Online shopping can distract during work

— -- Facebook status updates. Funny YouTube videos. Daily-deal e-mails.

There's already a deluge of distractions for workers, and now there's a new one to add to the list: holiday gift buying.

Cyber Monday was the unofficial start to the online holiday shopping season, and many workers plan to tackle their gift lists on work computers and via personal smartphones and tablets used during work hours.

"The main driver behind the heavy work-based spending activity is that people want to make purchases without their family members looking over their shoulders at what they're ordering," says Andrew Lipsman, vice president of industry analysis at ComScore.

About half of Cyber Monday spending comes from work computers, says Lipsman. That will drop off only slightly in the following weeks, to about 40% to 45%, he says.

ComScore predicts that online sales for November and December will hit $37.6 billion, a 15% rise over 2010.

The average online holiday shopper plans to spend 32 hours on the Web, with seven of those spent on company-supplied devices such as laptops, smartphones and PCs, according to a survey by IT professionals association ISACA.

Among reasons workers head online:

•Retailers make it tempting to indulge in cubicle shopping. Walmart and Toys R Us, for instance, don't just celebrate Cyber Monday. Instead, they offer a "Cyber Week" of price-reduced specials.

•Many employees are conditioned to the convenience of using the Web for personal tasks during the work day, such as online banking, so they easily make the jump to shopping, says Lipsman.

•Some shoppers prefer to expose their work computers to potential viruses — and keep their own devices safe. A third of employees were "more concerned with protecting the security of my personal computer or smartphone than my work-supplied computer or smartphone," according to the ISACA survey.

As workplace shopping rises, companies are clamping down. Six in 10 chief information officers said their firms block access to online shopping sites, up from 48% last year, a survey by employment agency Robert Half Technology found. Nearly a quarter said their firms allow access but monitor for excessive use.

Employees who do have access should click with caution, says Debra Cohen, senior vice president of knowledge development at the Society for Human Resource Management.

Sure, some managers are flexible. And reliable employees shouldn't feel shy about asking for some time to snare a rare deal.

But it's easy to get caught up in the online shopping frenzy, and Cohen cautions shoppers to keep their priorities straight: "The bottom line is that the organization is paying you to get a job done," she says.