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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.
You're commenting on this AT WORK.
sulli
RTFJ.
Another pointy haired boss policy. Treating professionals like children does lead to decreased productivity.
I was the porno cop at a 150 employee telecom company a few years ago. Highly paid programmers with tight deadlines turned out to have
At the end of the day, two people left before the ax swung, the sexual harrasment was institutional and only slightly blunted
3% - 5% in any company are going to have some sort of problem and it ought to be dealt with on a performance basis rather than using a squid enforced police state.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
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.
Remember, if you comment on this from work you're stealing from your employer. I always take days off to read Slashdot.
The solution that has worked best for me...is to avoid public discussion. -- CmdrTaco
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
...whoops! I guess I should stop monitoring my corporate network. :)
...and he fired me for reading /. on company time. The link is wrong BTW.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
If you can do it on the web from work in a few minutes, why would you need to take a day off to do it from home? The web is open 24 hours! Take a few minutes at home to get it done in the evening instead of taking the day off. If you don't have an Internet connection at home, go to the library. That's just ridiculous.
I sometimes do visit "questionable" sites from work. When I am doing that, I just SSH tunnel home and proxy from there.
Why does everyone complain when they are expect to actually do work at work. They are not paying you to keep the seat warm.
On another point I say 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.
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.
That can make a difference. If a company is monitoring and blocks certain web sites, say p0rn, they are rightly to do so. I can not see how that can have a negative impact on a workplace. I can also understand if a company wants to block activity of music share programs, I believe, they are rightly to do so. You are not paying for the bandwidth, they are.
I can also see that if a technology company (for example) blocks sites like slashdot (for example), that could possible be harmful. There seems to be a fine line of the control that is put into place and the up-keep of morale.
There is also a thing call respect and honesty. Yes, somethings can be done faster while at work without net monitoring, but is the company really getting what they are paying for? (that is the worker, and the product s/he produces)
The question is, "Is what I am doing honest towards the company or not?"
Take a look around and see how many office mates make personal phone calls from work.
I've worked with people that made 5-10 personal calls every single day.
Now, take a look at how many services have moved over to the web. Airline reservations, hotel bookings, banking and much more can be done over the web.
I think that companies are really making too big of a deal out of "lost production because of internet usage."
Place the blame where it should be placed - on the employee whos productivity suffers.
Hey Mr Boss - if you install this software to spy on us, our productivity will go down.
It will?
Er, yeah - this report says so.
Hmmm... Well, on the basis of it, you'd better continue peer-to-peer filesharing and pr0n surfing then...
Get your own free personal location tracker
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
From: Management
Re: Corporate "watchdog software"
In regard to your comment #5252053, the administration would like to point out that we HAVE found out, and request that you would kindly remove all personal belongings from your cubicle by the end of the day. You can find boxes in the supply room.
Sincerely,
PHB
PS: Don't bother coming in on Monday.
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
I mean, after you fire joe blow.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
First it was the phone. Then it was e-mail. Then it was the Internet. Ever since 19th century sweatshops had people reading Bible verses to their employees, management has worried about lost productivity.
The question they fail to ask, though, is: why do people waste part of their eight hour day? Because they don't need eight hours every day to do their jobs. Maybe they need twelve one day and four the next. Maybe they need six months of fourteen hour days and six months off.
I think a larger issue needs to be addressed: do we still need the traditional eight-hour work day? If you're in a reactive job (manning phones or a cash register), I can understand it.
For everyone else, it is just for appearance's sake. "Quick! Look busy!"
Um, weren't these guys one of the original hypemongers of the "new economy," telling us that the way dotcommers ran their business would become The Way? Yeah, I'll be sure to take their business suggestions real seriously. Now, why the hell should an employer have to pay for an employee doing personal things for "a few minutes or hours" (Hours?! Jesus.) when they're supposed to be helping improve the company?
That and the second part about employees doing more work at home than goofing of at work all boil down to one thing: Learn how to manage your friggin' time properly and you won't have to worry about that.
I am the network admin at a small manufacturing company (~300 people, including plant workers). With the ever-increasing number of workstations available to low-skilled workers (especially after hours), there is a great temptation to mess around with the computer when the boss isn't looking. We've had hard drives and RAM stolen (solution), people drawing "creative" wallpaper in MS Paint (solution), and all sorts of other unproductive stuff.
I'd love to be able to trust ALL network users, but unfortunately it is not possible in a manufacturing facility. If this was purely an office setting, then our T1 would be unrestricted.
I hate my job and so why should I care abo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
/. at work is stealing and might be a violation of the DMCA!
****BOSS NET FILTER ACTIVATED!****
I love my job and want to apologize to the world for stealing company electrons for my own personal use. I am the happiest corporate drone of all time and would like to remind all employees that reading
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
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....
I have to agree 100%. I've always told people that spikes in storage and/or spikes in bandwidth usually get my attention automagically.
Have them do something on their system to demonstrate.
My pager then goes off as they begin to understand.
Explain "spam" and what to do with inbound. Outbound is, well, just unacceptable. Other minor guide lines, etc.
I have a secretary that I *know* is instant messaging with her daughter in a far away state. I "monitor" phone bills too and have seen such calls from time to time. Nothing regular and lengthy -- but family *is* part of who you hire. People, we *are* all just people...
I'd rather have her chat when she can. I know when the work isn't getting done. People also know that anybody and everybody wanders the building and may end up looking at your screen at any time. What was the passing game to do 20 years ago in your office? Same problem, different era.
Yeah, I _could_ try and *CONTROL* people and make their will mine. I would also have very hostile employees...
A recent survery found that the majority of US Businessess practice some form of computer workplace monitoring.
PS: Don't bother coming in on Monday.
Woohoo! Three day weekend!
My religion forbids the use of sigs.
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
"....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.
You can just use httptunnel or any of the commercial products (www.loopholesoftware.com) out there to do all your secure browsing, chatting etc. It shows up as encrypted ssl web traffic so you don't have to worry about people watching everything you do. At my place of work, all web, phone and chat access is monitored through proxies. During the times when I need to unwind from the stress at work, it's good to be able to chat or browse /., etc. and then get back on track. I think people need diversions during the day to keep productive.
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."
This is old. I can remember a few of my jobs
where monitoring was close, if not closer than
what I see today.
One of them was where I was working for the
Department of Defense. We all worked in an open
area. The desks were set up like desks in a large
classroom. There were not deviders or partitions.
In front of the room was the glass enclosed (not
frosted glass, mind you, but the clear kind)
office of the manager. He might has well had
his desk in front, just like my teacher when I
was a little boy in school.
4 people shared each phone. The computer terminals
were on tables along one side of the room, also
in plain site of the manager's. office.
No newspapers were allowed. If you spent too
much time talking with someone, the manager is
bound to notice and look up with a frown.
A buzzer sounded at 7 AM when the workday started.
The horn of the lunch truck signaled the beginning
of lunch. A buzzer sounded at 3:30 in the
afternoon for the day's. end.
Another job I had was in a high security
environment. A closed circuit TV camera was
mounted in one corner of the room, visible to
all desks. The person at the monitor for that
camera could see all of us and what we were
doing.
IMHO, this is monitoring.
Mark
Cleara
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
- Hire decent, reliable people. (seriously, who can't point to half the people they work with and go, "why were they hired in the first place?") You should be able to tell based on their interview, credentials, past performance, etc, if you are about to hire a responsible person, or a day-trading addict. If you can't, maybe you shouldn't be the one hiring people. Find someone who can.
- Give people work to do, and expect it gets done on time. If you have an employee that CAN piss away 7 hours reading Slashdot, then you should probably "down-size" them. How about assign projects, give them a reasonable time to do it, and let them do it. If they can do the work well, and give themselves some free-time to surf, hey, whatever. If they surf the whole time, and the deadline rolls around and nothing is done or the work is shoddy. "goodbye".
- Check on your employees once in awhile. Do managers just have teams they never talk to? Yes, probably, the manager himself is probably in his office beating off to goatce.sx. How about hire managers that round robin their employees, staying in touch with them, checking on them, helping them. You'll find those idiots that always seem to have Minesweeper on the screen when you walk in, real fast. No need for Big Brother.
You shouldnt be hiring humans if you want robotic fixed patterns of movements and actions. I dont know about everyone else, but very much of the time Im staring off into space or glancing at CNN.com, the problems at hand are bubbling around in my head, imaginging the scenarios out, taking in the big picture of the project... then when I lay hands to keyboard, I do it once, and I do it right. It just seems to me, it should never have to get as far as this elementary school spy bullshit.I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
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.
Gotta do it.. gotta parse those Snort logs and see what's been crossing the wire. At this company, no one cares if you take a break and catch up on the scores, political news, slashdot, etc... but when 19 unique PORN signatures show up (about 250 total hits) for a month, that's out of line. And when your Gnutella habits suck up half the available upstream circuit, you're also out of line. You're paid to work, to complete a set of tasks and move on to the next set. No one denies the occasional break, especially if previous job performance shows good work. But, you're not paid to swap files or check out hentai. Deal with it.
Personally, it depresses me.. I despise the times I have to check the logs, knowing that some coworkers cannot seem to maintain some professionalism, even if they aren't being actively managed at 2am.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
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.
Yeah, my friend works for a company that sets up porn sites, and he said when I.T. implemented Net filtering, productivity went down the tubes... :-)
employee morale is generally down when net controls are in place
Firings will continue until morale improves!
---
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
I used to work for a company that did this. It was a great place to work and socialize. We'd go out after hours to relax together - all 30 to 40 of us.
We all got our work done before deadlines.
Then the 'management' instituted this internet/mail watch. One video clip e-mailed *to* me later wound up hurting 15 guys on the cc list. The guy who sent it was banned from the net. The rest of us were all banned from the net for 30 days and we didn't even have to have seen it. I hadn't even checked my mail before they summoned us into one room to chew us all out.
I left the company three weeks later over this as did several others. Now, for the people that still work there, they say the company morale sucks and morale was never like it was from 1998 to 2000. Too bad, too. Really great bunch of people they were.
Now, the company has gone through four layoffs and is working with a skeleton crew.
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.
- Systems repair because some jerk downloaded some pr0n4U.exe file that fucked up his machine
- Systems repair where people fill their hard drives with pr0n, mp3s, warez
- LAN slowdown because people are downloading pr0n, mp3s, warez
The list goes on and on! You know what *I* think of people who do this crap instead of work? Lazy bastards! So do you know what I think of spying on them?
Pointless.
I mean, you knew who did work and who didn't. I don't care what employee A's reason of lack of work was, he wasn't working! He could have been reading highly technical manuals, staring off into space, embracing co-ed frottage at the water cooler, whatever. He/she's a slacker! And not in the good "Bob" way, either. I could have told you that without any bandwidth-stealing monitoring software.
The fact is, if you can't tell how an employee is doing with proof of work... you got bigger problems._
_________________________________________________
www.punkwalrus.com - a journal into the forays of living mysteries
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?
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.
If you post a list of people and "inappropriate sites visited" for the month, people will take the hint:
John Smith: funwithgoats.com 172 visits
Depending on which department you're in of course. Certain departments may take this the wrong way and use this to find popular links.
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.