Slashdot Mirror
Negative Effects of Workplace Net Monitoring
Masem writes "Business2.com reports that while many corporations have monitoring tools and restrictions on Internet usages for non-work related activities, these can have negative effects on the productivity of the workplace. The report notes that people have to take days off from work to deal with personal business that could have been done in a few minutes or hours from a work net connection, and that employee morale is generally down when net controls are in place." A related study suggests employees spend more time doing work from home than playing at work.
I think especially as projects get piled on people, the ability to take a break and escape from your projects is of paramount importance. An Internet connection is the water cooler of the future, so to speak.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
As a manager I don't care if my employees surf the web at work. When I assign them a task I have a good idea how long it should take. If Joe Blow always takes longer than expected, I'll fire him, web surfing or not. If Jane Bleep routinely finishes her work ahead of time, I'll make sure she gets the biggest raise, come evaluation time, plus I'll praise her work in the next team meeting, and little could I care if she reads
In general people cannot properly focus for more than a few hours on one issue without taking a break. If people are going to take breaks anyway why not let them access the net (of course, I don't think they should be accessing porn sites and such from work, but why not Slashdot, etc)?
Of course at this point some programmers will chime in about how they can focus on their code for 12 hours... Save it for someone else. In my experience people who do that tend to write substandard code, because usually the best way to solve a thorny coding issue is to STEP AWAY from the computer (or switch away from the code editor anyway) for a while and let your mind think of other things while it processes the problem. Sitting there beating the problem over the head with more and more brute-force code is not the way to solve it.
"....employee morale is generally down when net controls are in place."
Administrator morale is generally down when employees are free to download every spyware app known to man, then complain to IT about their Windoze boxes blowing up while they were entering their network passwords into Gator.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Where I work (a 250 bed hospital), every employee who has a desk has a computer which is wired to the network. We also have monitoring software which can and does monitor the outbound traffic. Being one of two network admins (it's a large network) part of my responsability is to make sure that no one ABUSES the priviledge of being able to surf the web. Don't get me wrong, company policy states the usuall "no personal business at work", but it's very loosly enforced. Recently I have been having to more closely monitor the traffic becuse there were a few individuals that were spending most of their time visiting porn sites - some of them nurses. The thing is, everyone jumps to accuse corporate policy about monitoring, but the problem really lies in the few employees that abuse the privilage.
My good sig is in the laundry
The economist George Akerlof modeled the cooperative aspects of the labor market formally in a paper called "Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange" ( Quarterly Journal of EconomicsVol. 97, No. 4, pp. 543-569).
I find the view that reading /. or making phone calls at work is "stealing" to be naive and simplistic --- so much depends on subtle (or not so subtle) levels of effort that cannot be measured or coerced. The poster's comments that "two can play at that game. You want me to work every second I am at work that's fine. But when that clock hits 5:00 I drop everything and leave." illustrate this perfectly.
blog-O-rama
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
I work from home on weekends sometimes and I surf and do personal stuff at work sometimes. Its a trade-off as far as I'm concerned. If they ever complained or took it away at work then they would see me in at 9 out at 5, right on the dot. I also wouldn't be doing any work at home. They don't trust me then I won't go the extra mile for them.