39.5% of all Romanian employees with access to the Internet use instant messaging programs during their working hours, a poll conducted by BestJobs, answered by 1,627 people, indicates. "Most companies in Romania loss 25% of their employees' productivity because they spend time chatting with friends. As an average, employees waste at least 2 or 3 hours on the Internet", said Neogen marketing manager Constantin Ferseta, quoted by NewsIn.

The recruiting specialist says that employers may put an end to this situation by banning the use of programs like Yahoo Messenger, Skype or Google Talk.

Representatives of another recruiting company, Psihoselect, consider that employees who waste time "on the mess" are those who don't have enough work to do in the office. According to the specialists, this kind of conversations is not the reason why labor productivity is affected, instead the managers who allow too many hours for completing a job are to blame.

On the other hand, Eliza Nechifor, marketing and communication coordinator at Manpower, believes that using instant messaging services boosts productivity, since it brings more ease in the interior communication.

According to a study conducted by IT Secure Pro, a company distributing software for monitoring the network traffic, the Internet surf to websites that have nothing to do with the employees' activity causes productivity losses up to 40% per year.

A Romanian employee produces a 400 euros profit for the employer every year, 10 times less than the European average and less than half than the Eastern and Central European average.