Facebook At Work: Lost Productivity and Lost Jobs

Two recent article tying Human Resources and Facebook:

 

-The first is from WorldatWork and quotes a Nucleus Research report which says that Facebook use costs an average of 1.5% in lost productivity

 

My question for that article is: what would they be doing if they weren't on Facebook? Work or some other form of distraction? There usually is no business reason to be on Facebook, but the harms of a person on Facebook seems to be much less than them using the internet for other, more malicious uses. Sometimes a quick distraction is all an employee needs to be more productive for the rest of the day (I know that's the case with me). Is 1.5% loss in productivity (a hard thing to measure to begin with) really that bad? Just playing Devil's Advocate and throwing that out there...

 

-The other is from Mashable and has a great title: "FACEBOOK FIRED: 8% of US Companies Have Sacked Social Media Miscreants"

 

My question here is how many of these people are truly "miscreants" (as the picture from TheNextWeb above, used in the Mashable article, clearly shows) and how many people are just using Facebook? The statistic says that the number has doubled in the past year, but how many companies, attuned to their employees now using social networking/media at work, have recently installed policies or monitoring for their use? How many employees are simply doing what they did a year earlier but just getting caught for doing it this year? Again...just throwing that out there as food for thought