Ethical Dilemma: Cyberloafing

The topic that I have chosen is cyberloafing. It involves employees using the internet at their place of work, during working hours, to conduct activities that are not related to their work. For example, cyberloafing could occur when employees perform shopping or use social media platforms during work time. I have chosen this topic because of the prevalence of instances of cyberloafing among employees. It is not uncommon to find employees placing their orders during online shopping or chatting with a friend during work time. Most of the employees are unaware of the thin line between rejuvenating and wasting time during work time. I thus sought to explore this topic to show the difference between rejuvenating and wasting precious company time.

People should care about cyberloafing because of its prevalence in today’s world. According to Kalejaiye and Hammed (2021), a survey conducted by Vault.com indicated that “88% of employees surf non-work-related websites during working hours and 66% surf between 10 minutes and one hour". This is a major concern for businesses because of the amount of time wasted. There are some researchers that claim that small amounts of cyberloafing are actually good for the employees although other researchers claim that cyberloafing is actually a bad habit, just like procrastination at the workplace. People should thus care about the topic of cyberloafing because it could be beneficial in helping the employees take quick breaks that allow their brains to re-calibrate between tasks which could help to alleviate work stress. However, it is also argued that cyberloafing is a waste of productive company time and could pose security risks to the business.

The business challenge that is posed by cyberloafing is that cyberloafing allows the employees to flood the computing resources at work for their personal use. This could lead to clogging of the company’s bandwidth and potential degradation of the system performance. Other business challenges that are posed by cyberloafing include increased instances of security risks, reduced productivity among the employees, and increased risks of computer malware and viruses (Kalejaiye & Hammed, 2021). It is thus evident that cyberloafing causes numerous challenges to the business. The purpose of this paper will be to explain the benefits of cyberloafing in allowing the employee’ brains to re-calibrate between tasks which could help to alleviate work stress, while cyberloafing could pose challenges in clogging of the company’s bandwidth and causing potential degradation of the system performance, increasing security risks, reducing productivity among the employees, and increasing risks of computer malware and viruses.

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