Playing Facebook games is probably one of the biggest crazes nowadays. In fact, we get numerous invitations from friends from all over the world to join and play with them. Popular ones include: Farmville and Café World by Zynga, Pet Society and Restaurant City by Playfish, and Happy Aquarium by Crowdstar. Among these, Farmville is probably the most popular with 70 million users.
Facebook has approximately 350 million users worldwide and about one fifth of them play online games. That is okay if it is done at home. However, it has been proven that these games are also played at work.
In India alone, their Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry said that survey results revealed that about 12.5 percent of corporate sector employees’ productivity goes into playing Facebook games. That is like one hour of every employee’s 8-hour workday.
In the US, Nucleus Research, Inc. found that almost half of office staff visit the social networking site at work. So that about 1.5 percent of productivity is lost. That is like 7 minutes of work lost daily per employee working on an 8-hour shift.
Because of this loss in productivity, many companies have banned access to social networking sites. However, there are some people who think that these games are good for employees, as long as it’s not overdone.
According to Santosh Chaturvedi, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bangalore, online games are beneficial to employees because their mind gets to take a break from work. This change in mindset may allow them to concentrate better when they get back to work, thus increasing productivity.
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