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
...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
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.
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!
it ought to be dealt with on a performance basis rather than using a squid enforced police state.
I, for one, welcome our calamari overlords.
*ducks*
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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.
I mean, after you fire joe blow.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
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.
I own a tiny shop, I require everyone to read slashdot 3 times a day for 20 minutes each. ( 1 hour total ).
Why, real simple, knowledge equals growth. I spend 2 years lurking, just learning. I got to say slashdot gives the best education for every stupid line you write.
Plus the shared knowledge of the community gives me the edge up on others. So, yes, slashdot should be a required reading at all firms that are in the tech field.
Onepoint
if you see me, smile and say hello.
"....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.
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."
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.
The only way I can respond to this post is, "Well, DUH!" I've worked for a 150 person company for 12 years as the I.T. Director, so we've always joked that my unwritten title has been "Director of Covert I.T. Operations".
The bottom line is that, yes, this should be dealt with on a performance basis, but what do you do when you realize that an employee is underperforming? Do you just give them a warning that they are not performing at the level you expect them to? Or, do you turn to these tools for that individual to prove that they are wasting huge amounts of company time (at least to the manager, if not to the HR department and the employee himself)?
That's what we have always done and it has generally been effective without causing ill-will from employees. If you hire someone to do a job, and they are not doing that job, then you need to somehow show why if you intend to fire them (at least here in California, I don't know if you can just fire people for no reason in other states) or even if you just want them to do a better job. Also, there is NO employee I've ever met who likes the extra workload because they have to work with someone they know is screwing off while they are working hard.
Nobody gets pissed off when you fire jerks who refuse to do their work. Believe me, there are plenty of people out there who seriously think it's OK to talk on the phone ALL DAY (I'm talking 4-8 hours non-stop) while they work, and screwing off on the internet in IM, porno sites, Hotmail, etc. is no different. There will always be people who will abuse their freedoms at work and we have to use tools case-by-case to weed them out.
Aside from people who can't get their jobs done, we have always given employees a lot of leeway on doing personal things during company time. Nobody cares that I'm posting this right now, and I don't care if other employees do things like this either, as long as they get their jobs done! Performance has to be king to keep everybody happy!
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.