A recent survey found that workers in office jobs will spend at least two full working days shopping online this holiday season.

Shopping online on the company dime is nothing new, but employers can expect sharp increases in workers shopping while on the clock. Earlier surveys have found that workers with computer jobs spend on average 20 percent of their workday on non-work-related Internet activity, and it wouldn’t be surprising to hear that number has come up in recent years thanks to the exponential growth of social networking sites.

There is some debate about whether or not some net leisure time is actually helpful to a workforce, as a recent study out of the University of Melbourne has found that workers who engage in “Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB)” are actually more productive than those who don’t. However, the study caps WILB at 20 percent of the day, and notes that for certain personality types allowed WILB will have the opposite effect.

This demonstrates that employers need to regulate not just where their employees can go on the web, but how long they can spend on non-work-related activities. Being able to regulate employee time on the web, a feature of InternetSafety.com business filtering solutions, allows employers to allow the right amount of WILB without it hurting their bottom line.

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