It’s an accepted fact of modern office life that staff will often browse sites like YouTube and Facebook at work. Sure, some employers hate it and try to block such sites from the workplace but in general, I think that employers should acknowledge that trying to force staff to use every second of their working time only on official tasks is a poor strategy. It makes more sense to gauge the effectiveness of staff, especially in roles where a significant amount of creativity or independent thinking is required, through concrete goals and performance targets while allowing employees to manage their own time as they see fit. In some cases, using such banned websites may actually be helpful to some people in their jobs so a blanket ban is just a hindrance.

One employer however has hit on a novel strategy. Instead of directly blocking offending sites from the office computers, the employer puts such sites on a watchlist and then triggers ear piercing alarms whenever an employee in the room browses onto a site on the list. According to the blog post, this allows employees who legitimately need access to these sites to continue to use them but publicly shames employees who are just goofing off at work. The Freakonomics authors seem to think that this is a pretty smart idea but judging from the comments posted in response to their article, the vast majority of people don’t agree.