The digital drift

Combating cyberloafing starts with trust, thrives on transparency, and succeeds through genuine employee engagement.

- SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE

In the early 2000s a digital revolution was about to change the way how people interact and engage in their social lives. As social media platforms like Friendster emerged, a company named Facebook started to gain momentum with the potential of starting a new era of social transformation. It marked the beginning of the war amongst big corporates fighting for user attention using complex algorithms and urgency cues in the digital world. This resulted in development of manipulative dark patterns embedded within the platforms that seeks to gain one's attention and increase user engagement. Its effect was far reaching and was observed in the daily lives of users with decreased productivity and an adverse effect on mental health. The impact of this phenomenon also started appearing in workplaces around the world and it quickly turned into one of the major challenges in modern human resource management: 'The problem of cyberloafing.'

Cyberloafing and its impact

The boom of technology helped ease work but it carried along with its problems of distraction. The usage of non-work-related websites as well as surfing through the social media during working hours was the cause of the phenomenon of distraction, which is termed as cyberloafing. It includes activities like online shopping, chatting, and gaming, etc. Any voluntary act of employees using their companies' internet access during office hours to surf non-job-related websites for personal purposes and to check (including receiving and sending) personal email is misuse of the internet. Such activity is commonly known as cyberloafing (Lim, 2002).