For Some Workers The Summer Holiday Won’t End

For Some Workers The Summer Holiday Won’t Quite End

Cyberbludging Costs Employers Millions

Auckland, 31 January 2001 – As holidays are well over now for most of us, many employers risk finding some staff will have only provisionally come back to work.

“Internet use is booming in the workplace, but most New Zealand employers still have no idea how much time their staff spend online each day, and how much of this is wasted,” says Rodney Martin, Worldwide Chief Operating Officer for the Auckland-based CommSoft Group.

“Research here and overseas points to high non-work use of the Internet during work hours,“ he says. “This amounts to big losses in time, ISP costs and bandwidth. As the country goes back to work employers who value productivity need to take a close look at just how the web gets used.”

Mr Martin says cyberbludging in Australia has been estimated to cost over A$300 million annually, according to a July 2000 report by Websense Employment Internet Management software distributors Lanvision.

Australian workers spent an average of 3.6 hours a week doing personal transactions while on the job, such as banking and organising holidays -- an increase in personal web use on the boss’s time of 70 percent since 1997.

In New Zealand during the 12 months to June 2000, ACNielsen Netwatch* reported that 101,000 people gave their main purpose for accessing the Internet as being for professional or business use only.

Within this group, 25 percent engaged in “general surfing” activity, nine percent accessed information on travel and 12 percent accessed sports information.

“These results are very much in line with surveys in the United States,” Mr Martin says. “The message for employers is clear: you need to know how your employees are spending their time on the web.”

One recent United States survey reported 13 percent of employees spending two hours engaged in unauthorised Internet use each day.

Products such as CommSoft’s NetMaster software provide easy-to-use reports showing all Internet use within a business.

After installing NetMaster one New Zealand client recently solved a major bandwidth problem by introducing protocols that permitted non-work downloads only during lunch or after hours.

“A product like NetMaster makes the level of use transparent. While many employees need to be on the web, with this tool managers can ensure that a business makes the best use of the resource,” Mr Martin says.

ENDS

About Netmaster
NetMaster tracks all Internet access at work to report usage by employees, costs and time, data downloaded and most visited sites.

It differentiates from other Internet Management software in that:

* NetMaster is a line manager’s tool, not a technical IT tool. Typically, managers can be trained to use it in 20 minutes.

* NetMaster is “sniffer-based” as opposed to Proxy-Server based and therefore does not interfere with network performance or reliability.

* NetMaster will work with any Ethernet LAN/WAN based network topology and independent of the Internet gateway.

About CommSoft Group Limited
CommSoft Group Limited is an international leader in the development of niche software products for the telecommunications industry.

CommSoft develops and markets leading edge telecommunications software to help small to medium enterprises make better use of their telecommunications equipment through better cost management, increased staff productivity and improved customer service. Its products are bundled with products and services by some of the world's largest telecommunications suppliers.

More information on CommSoft is available on the web at

www.commsoftgroup.com

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