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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.
When we get a blocked site, we just plug in an 802.11x card and surf through one of the TWO DOZEN unsecured access points in range... Or VNC home...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I sometimes do visit "questionable" sites from work. When I am doing that, I just SSH tunnel home and proxy from there.
and was in charge of the "web tracking database". Although we blocked porn (about 30k sites) you can never get them all. Part of my duty was to give monthly lists of top porn abusers.
...
I felt like I was peeping, looking at people's web habbits. It was truly the low point of my job. However, the execs (who were given access) thought it was a hoot, and (rumour has it) spent hours snikering over this stuff.
I just noticed none of this is really "on topic"... oh well
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Zero monitoring is done for "performance management"--all that is handled through an employee's management chain. The expectation is that employees get all their work done. If they deliver good work on time, who CARES how much they surf? We treat our employees like adults, and find that the vast majority of them are able to manage their time properly.
Senior management long ago decided to embrace the Internet economy--how hypocritical would it be for Intel to forbid our employees from participating on company time and Internet connectivity?
I eBay online, bank online, read news (and /. too) online, and yes, I'm posting from work. It's a wonderful policy, "reasonable personal use." If in doubt, ask your manager: it's as simple as that.
Yeah, but you're still using company bandwidth. I don't write my Slashdotting hours on my timecard, but I'm still consuming company property for personal use. I have mixed feelings about the ethics of Slashdotting on work computers. I work in tech, so in a way I'm just keeping on top of recent developments. I also work for a university that I attend as a student, so really the bandwidth is mine to use as a student if not as an employee. But these are questions we should consider when we catch ourselves mindlessly reloading Slashdot ten times/hour.
are usually made by idiots or people with a real power trip going.
I tell them I monitor it, and I kind of do with the squid proxy for porn related... yes, I'm evil and squashing your rights to disallow you watching fisting or beatality videos here at work...
but it's common knowlege in all the offices I maintain and supply that I dont give a rats ass what you do or where you go...BUT, if you are the source for a virus attack or I get complaints... I will fry your but hard.
Overzealous monitoring is only done by people that really need to be on medical leave and treated for the social and mential disorders that they are afflicted with.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yeah, I've seen people at work checking personal email, stock and sports scores and the news. This is probably more helpful than hurtful. Here the line is drawn to exclude anything that uses significant bandwidth, anything that opens the company network up to the outside, and anything that is illegal or could get the company sued. Oh yeah, you still have to get your job done too. I've also seen employees download literally gigs of music and video(until they were caught), people spending loads of time on instant messenger, 10 Meg video joke files getting forwarded to hundreds of people. Geez, people, use some common sense.
Running a properly configured GNU/Linux system to solve that problem is like buying steel doors, deadbolts, window bars, and $3,000 security system for your house. Now, do you still have the UPS man leave your packages on the sill of the front door?
Maybe you're spoofing your box's identity when you connect to the company's internet onramp? Swiped someone else's IP address, didja? That'd help, but there's still other things you'd have to consider.
Try this, too:
https://proxy.magusnet.com/-_-[your url here]
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I'm the guy stuck monitoring web usage where I work. We try to be reasonable, but it only takes one idiot to bring the world down on everyone. Our HR dept tells us we really can't handle issues on a case-by-case basis: we have to have a blanket policy that (in theory) applies to everyone. So the guy who does (or wants to do) a little banking from work is punished because some moron won't quit trying to get to pornobabes.com. As bad as it was when it was "no personal use of the internet," it became worse when we tried a "limited personal use of the internet" policy. We have met the enemy, and it is us....
1. As a programmer, I often have to learn new technologies and find new ways of doing things. Books are good, but there is nothing better than the internet. When I've had to do things like image compression (not my forte as a developer) I've blatantly 'stolen' code from various sites.
/. is because it's frequently updated with something new (and occasionally interesting) to read. I'm so used to this, that when I reboot, my first impulse is to switch to my browser. Then I realize that I can't, and I look around for a book or something.
2. As a programmer, I'm often presented with short minutes of downtime, while I recompile. My habit of switching to my browser at these moments is very deeply ingrained. The reason I read
The point of this rant is "trust but verify." I was pretty permissive about what people did, and almost everyone paid that back with respect for my requests. Some hard-line sysadmins I knew were always complaining of problems, and trying desperately to implement technical measures preventing people from (e.g.) shopping during their lunch hours. Consequently their users hated them. I had, and enforced, only one policy, trusting the users to make the best use of their own time. If they had a performance problem it was their manager's problem, not mine, and it was measured by actual work performance, not 'net access logs.
When I ran the network for a 60-person architecture firm, I used to bust people for porn, but nothing else. Every new employee got the same schpiel: "Do what you want with your computer, aside from setting it on fire. See these settings here? They're company-wide. You can change 'em, but they'll be back in the morning. Here's where you make your own custom settings. You can't install anything from your browser, which is for your own security; ask me if you want to install anything else and I'll probably say yes. One thing - no porn."
It worked well, and most people said it was much more lenient than other places they'd worked. The company's policy was "no porn" and I supported it whole-heartedly. I don't care if people watch porn, but doing it at work is (a) nasty and (b) begging for a lawsuit.
I'd bust someone, usually a new hire, about every six months. Some of them did a brilliant job of sanitizing their machines, but they couldn't get to the proxy logs. They'd get a stern talking to by the principals, enough to make most of 'em wet themselves, 'specially when presented with a list of all the sites they visited, and we had no repeat offenders.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
"The question they fail to ask, though, is: why do people waste part of their eight hour day?"
Some services (especially banks and physicians) are only available for a small part of the day. There may be some overlap, but what can you do when a customer-service line or bank closes at 4:00PM and you don't get out of work until 5:30PM?
Slowdowns during the day aren't uncommon. As someone else said, when you're waiting for a program to compile, it's an opportunity to look at the Internet or personal email. There can be a brief lull between meetings, waiting for coworkers, etc.
do we still need the traditional eight-hour work day?
Try collaborating with a group in a different timezone -- preferably overseas. When you only have an hour or two when everyone is "in the office", organization and communication becomes difficult and slow. The same thing would happen if everyone picked their own hours and days.
You're right, your IM and slashdot reading and occasional song download isn't taking that much bandwidth. it's everyone's at your location that takes the bandwidth.
My office has a T1, and between the hours of 9 and 5, my averate throughput from ibiblio is 12kps. I could do better with a 28.8 modem. as soon as everyone goes home, i can get 160kps. -- and we've already blocked all the popular p2p ports.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Every week, the proxy logs were automatically collated and sorted by userid[1] and bandwidth used, then posted to a web site. All completely automatically. It took about 30mins to set up. The logs linked from the internal corporate web site so everyone in the company can see them and all the employees (several tens of thousands) were informed that their web viewing habits would be published.
There was a couple of porn sites and some *serious* bandwidth hogs the first few weeks, but nothing since. I can't imagine a reason to hire people specifically to do this kind of crap, sounds like someone has too much money.
[1] You have to login to the gateway proxies.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Spot on. This also dovetails with the 'breaks increase productivity' comments above. I am an independent contractor, basically a one-man IT department for most of my customers, guru-in-reserve for a few others. I generally work 4-6 hour days. I only push it beyond 6 when I am really 'in the groove' and being highly productive. But most days, going past six doesn't make much sense. Be honest, how much do you actually accomplish in the last hour of most eight-hour workdays?
And incidentally I hate smokers. I hate them SOOO much, with their free extra breaktimes.
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Do you also hate non-smokers who take 10min walks periodically throughout the day to clear their head/get away from a problem?
That's pretty much how I use my smoke breaks. And since my boss and closest co-worker smoke, sometimes we'll take a smoke break but continue to talk through whatever it is we've been working on. Unfortunately, as a nicotiene addict, it is hard for me to know if my concentration is waning from some "natural" force or because my brain is craving it's drug and focusing more attention on it. I do know that a nicotiene fix for a nicotiene addict helps restore concentration (not to mention reduce crabbiness), so it's actually a productivity booster.
Unfortunately in the real world it's most often the perception of work done rather than the actual work done that is rewarded and the larger the corporation the more that seems to be true.
So what you are saying is that they aren't actually actively monitoring employees desktops, they just have the ability to take over desktops remotely to support them. You don't ask them for support, so they don't need to connect to your desktop.
I have a friend that worked in a really large company who went to do some "updates" to computers in the marketing department. He came upon one employees cube and there was Red Hat instead of NT running on the computer. Fortunetaly, I had introduced him to Linux, so he thought that was cool and moved on.
-BrentWhere I work as a sys admin, we used to have a box dedicated to monitoring web activity. While I disagreed with the monitoring of employees, I was told to implement it by the director. Morale across the office plummeted the very next day. It was horrible. One of the biggest complaints people had was that the monitoring software has no idea if you are on break or not... and if you are on break, why not visit your online banking? It is after all, YOUR time. To compound this matter, it turned out that the director had a voyeuristic streak to her.... She would spend over an hour a day looking at what sites people would go to....remember, this was not the employee's boss, this was their bosses' boss. She would never say anything to anyone about the stats.... She just liked to watch.
I thought, and still do think, that this was a complete waste of her time.... After all, isn't observing web based stats of employee web use just as bad?
Then it was the Internet. Ever since 19th century sweatshops had people reading Bible verses to their employees, management has worried about lost productivity
It wasn't until the LATE 19th century. It was really not until Pavlov that conditioning of humans seemed to be a real possibility.
This is why people are no longer free. The desire to micromanage free people like they are machines is inherently inhuman. The untold misery of modern world can be traced to that single fact.
Most of the attempts at conditioning workers to accept drudgery and to do so without any loss of efficiency is what created the modern school system. Public schools were created to solve the problem you have just presented. For the most part, they have worked. People no consider it completely normal they are not paid for a specific task, but to serve a function like a machine. Before, a farmer was paid for his produce. A mason was paid for the buildings he constructed or parts thereof. The cobbler was paid for his shoes. and so on...
Blame Andrew Carnegie and Charles Schwab (of US Steel, not his grandson of the broker fame) and their ilk. They looked upon us ignorant masses and decided to whip us into shape.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I was once busted for visiting CNN.com during lunch, one time.
I was also busted for visiting the MSDN site as well as other C++ websites. I'm a programmer.
A co-worker who conducts ALL his personal business from work ( he blames it on all his phone calls from home being long-distance and his mortgage) had pages and pages of non-work sites he had visited in 2 weeks time. Not a word was said to him.
It's fine to be restrictive, but be consistent.
Forget all this bullshit about productivity and smoke breaks and inappropriate web content. I have a subscription filtering system (be jealous, I work for a defense contract with IT money to burn) and we don't worry about what you're trying to browse on the clock. I could care less about you surfing over to cozycoeds.com. What I'm more concerned about are the uninformed user masses who assumed every pop-up they encounter is okay for them to explore. If not for a decent (and none are perfect) filter, Lord knows what trash my systems would be exposed to. But even with filters and firewalls, I still manage to have some dumbasses screw up my network. Excellent case in point, some web-clinker decides it's okay to d/l things on his own, load his own software, despite my best restrictions on Windohs. Turns out he causes this huge bottleneck on my network since his machine is consuming more bandwidth than my Exchange, SQL and file/print servers COMBINED! Users are 90% idiots. Bring on the filters.