Goldbricking (also called cyberloafing or cyberslacking) is the practice of doing less work than one is able to, while maintaining the appearance of working. The term originates from the
confidence trick
A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers have def ...
of applying a gold coating to a brick of worthless metal—while the worker may appear industrious on the surface, in reality they are less valuable.
A 1999 report estimated that cyberslacking cost employers in the United States $1 billion a year in computer resources. Instances of goldbricking increased markedly when
broadband
In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...
Internet connection
Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...
s became commonplace in workplaces. Before that, the slow speed of
dial-up
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...
connections meant that spending work time browsing on the internet was rarely worthwhile. Many firms employ
surveillance software
Spyware (a portmanteau for spying software) is software with malicious behaviour that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send it to another entity in a way that harms the user—for example, by violating their privac ...
to track employees' Internet activity in an effort to limit liability and improve
productivity
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
.
Goldbricking became a mainstream topic when
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
announced in late February 2013 that it was banning
remote work
Remote work, also called work from home (WFH), work from anywhere, telework, remote job, mobile work, and distance work is an employment arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work, such as an office building, ware ...
because it discovered its remote workers were not logging into the corporate
VPN
A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. The be ...
often enough.
Alternative views
Research has indicated that permitting employees to utilize computer resources for personal use actually increases productivity. A study by the
National University of Singapore
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a national public research university in Singapore. Founded in 1905 as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School, NUS is the oldest autonomous university in the c ...
entitled ''Impact of Cyberloafing on Psychological Engagement'' concluded that using the internet for personal use served the same purpose as a coffee break and helped workers concentrate and stay engaged. New research also shows that employees might use cyberloafing to cope with abusive and stressful conditions in the workplace, when they perceive that they are being treated unfairly (disrespected or given unreasonable deadlines)''.''
See also
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Counterproductive work behavior
Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is employee behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of an organization. These behaviors can harm organizations or people in organizations including employees a ...
*
Internet addiction disorder
Problematic internet use or pathological internet use is generally defined as problematic, compulsive use of the internet, that results in significant impairment in an individual's function in various life domains over a prolonged period of time. ...
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Interruption science
Interruption science is the interdisciplinary scientific study concerned with how interruptions affect human performance, and the development of interventions to ameliorate the disruption caused by interruptions. Interruption science is a branch o ...
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List of confidence tricks
Confidence tricks and scams are difficult to classify, because they change often and often contain elements of more than one type. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the "con artist" or simply "artist", and t ...
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Sandbagging (disambiguation)
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Slacker
A slacker is someone who habitually avoids work or lacks work ethic.
Origin
According to different sources, the term ''slacker'' dates back to about 1790 or 1898. "Slacker" gained some recognition during the British Gezira Scheme in the early t ...
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Work aversion
Refusal of work is behavior in which a person refuses regular employment."Refusal of work means quite simply: I don't want to go to work because I prefer to sleep. But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress. Auton ...
References
{{Reflist
Employee relations