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.

Comments

I use to work in network security

[ReidMaynard]

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 ...

Intel's policy: REASONABLE personal use.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at Intel, and actually enforce this policy. It's a great one! The company lands hard on people who are the subject of complaints (e.g., for visiting racist, "adult", or illegal (warez, etc.) sites).

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.

Re:Admit it!

[Milo Fungus]

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.

I used to bust people

[legLess]

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.