Switch to Daylight Saving Time Leads to Cyberloafing at the Office

After the annual shift to daylight saving time, employees are likely to spend more time online than normal surfing the Web for content unrelated to their work, causing potentially massive productivity losses, according to new research co-authored by a professor at the Penn State Smeal College of Business.

D. Lance Ferris, assistant professor of management and organization at Smeal, and his colleagues David T. Wagner, Christopher M. Barnes, and Vivien K. G. Lim, examined six years worth of data from Google and found that Web searches related to entertainment rose sharply the Monday after the shift to daylight saving time when compared to the preceding and subsequent Mondays. With prior research showing that people exhibit poorer self-control when they're tired, the researchers argue that the lost sleep due to the time change, an average of 40 minutes that Sunday night, makes employees less likely to self-regulate their behavior and more inclined to spend time cyberloafing, or surfing the Internet for personal pursuits while on the clock.

They also conducted a lab experiment in which they monitored subjects' sleep the night before they were required to watch a boring lecture online. The less sleep the subjects received the night before, the more time they spent surfing the Web when they were supposed to be watching the lecture. Interruptions in sleep had the same effect. In fact, the subjects on average engaged in 8.4 minutes more of cyberloafing (or 20 percent of the assigned task time) for every hour of interrupted sleep the night before.

While a few minutes of personal Web surfing now and then may seem harmless, given that about one-third of the world's countries participate in some form of daylight saving time, the researchers say that "global productivity losses from a spike in employee cyberloafing are potentially staggering." In light of their discovery and other research on the true energy-saving effects of daylight saving time, the authors encourage policymakers to revisit the costs and benefits of the time change policy.

More generally, though, their research has implications for managers, who in the current economy, are squeezing more and more work out of fewer employees.

"In the push for high productivity, managers and organizations may cut into the sleep of employees by requiring longer work hours," the researchers write. "This may promote vicious cycles of lost sleep, resulting in less time spent working, which could result in more frantic pushes for extended work time. Managers may find that by avoiding infringement on employee sleep, they will get more productivity out of their employees."

They argue that employers can facilitate more self-regulation of their employees' cyberloafing if they encourage their employees to get a sufficient amount of sleep. Outside of that, they recommend turning computer screens so that colleagues can see them or even providing designated break times when personal Internet use would be permissible.

"Lost Sleep and Cyberloafing: Evidence from the Laboratory and a Daylight Saving Time Quasi-Experiment" is forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology.