Goldbricking 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 scam, or a confidence trick, is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence, irrespons ...
of applying a gold coating to a brick of worthless metal—while workers may appear industrious or productive on the surface, in reality they are less valuable.
A 1999 report estimated that in the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
, because human employees sometimes use internet access at work for non-work related activities, $1 billion a year of employers' computer-resource costs did not yield their desired profitability. Additionally, instances of goldbricking increased markedly when
broadband
In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...
Internet connection
Internet access is a facility or service that provides connectivity for a computer, a computer network, or other network device to the Internet, and for individuals or organizations to access or use applications such as email and the World Wide ...
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 deploy
surveillance software to track employees' Internet activity in an effort to limit liability and to 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 proce ...
.
Goldbricking became a mainstream topic when
Yahoo!
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
announced in late February 2013 the banning of
remote work
Remote work (also called telecommuting, telework, work from or at home, WFH as an initialism, hybrid work, and other terms) is the practice of work (human activity), working at or from one's home or Third place, another space rather than from ...
: it had discovered that its remote workers were not logging into the corporate
VPN often enough.
Alternative views
Research has indicated that permitting employees to utilize computer resources for personal use actually increases productivity. Moreover, a study by the
National University of Singapore
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a national university, national Public university, public research university in Singapore. It was officially established in 1980 by the merging of the University of Singapore and Nanyang University ...
entitled ''Cyberloafing at the workplace: gain or drain on work?'' concluded that using the internet for personal use served the same purpose as a coffee break and helped workers concentrate and stay engaged. Additionally, 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's behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of an organization. This behavior can harm the organization, other people within it, and other people an ...
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Internet addiction disorder
Internet addiction disorder (IAD), also known as problematic internet use, or pathological internet use, is a problematic compulsive use of the internet, particularly on social media, that impairs an individual's function over a prolonged period ...
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Interruption science
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List of confidence tricks
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Sandbagging (disambiguation)
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Slacker
A slacker is someone who habitually work aversion, 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 UK, British Gezira Sche ...
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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. Autono ...
References
{{Reflist
Employee relations