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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 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, 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 Internet connections became commonplace in workplaces. Before that, the slow speed of dial-up 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.
Goldbricking became a mainstream topic when Yahoo! announced in late February 2013 the banning of remote work: it had discovered that its remote workers were not logging into the corporate VPN often enough.
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