The holidays are hard upon us and one of the most hallowed of holiday traditions — online shopping at work — is about to ramp up.

And if you’re a boss in the IT world, you may want to know that 7 in 10 of your employees will be wasting valuable time buying watches, pogo sticks and potboilers online.

Shopping on company time is nothing new and, as a survey from CareerBuilder reports, the frowned upon (by bosses) practice will be just about as frequent this year as last.

In 2015, half of all workers said they spent at least some time shopping online. This year, it’s up slightly — to 53 percent — with more folks saying they’ll use their smartphones or tablets than did in 2015 (49 percent vs. 42 percent).

Just over 10 percent of bosses said they’ve played Scrooge and fired someone for buying on company time, and slightly more than half say their organization blocks the most popular online sites.

Where the survey gets interesting is when employees are viewed by the industry in which they labor. The following breaks out CareerBuilder’s data by industry:

- Information technology: 68 percent.
- Financial services: 65 percent.
- Sales: 63 percent.
- Leisure and hospitality: 54 percent.
- Health care: 53 percent.
- Transportation: 42 percent.
- Manufacturing: 40 percent.
- Retail: 42 percent.

Bosses say any sort of non-work device fooling around on company time is irritating, and 33 percent said that even if someone’s productivity doesn’t appear to be suffering from surfing, they attempt to control it. Among the reactions reported:

- 35 percent monitor the sites employees visit.
- 52 percent restrict employees from posting on behalf of the company on social media.
- 29 percent have adopted stricter posting policies in the last year.
- 24 percent say they've fired someone for using the internet for non-work-related activity.
- 17 percent have fired an employee for something they posted on social media.

Most of those numbers were virtually the same as reported last year, although overall employers appear to have become slightly more tolerant in the last year. For instance, last year, 28 percent said they’ fired someone for online activity not related to their job, and in 2015, 55 percent said they restricted social media posting compared to this year’s 52 percent.

Instant Insights /

IT, financial services report most holiday online shopping at work

More From HR Executive

Related Stories

Recommended For You