Judge Rules in Favor of Websurfing at Work

MirrororriM writes "According MSNBC article, a judge has ruled in favor of a worker that was repeatedly warned for surfing the internet on company time. Only a "reprimand" is a fitting punishment - not termination. From the article: 'It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.'"

Comments

Bookmarking this!

[William Decker]

I think around 99% of /.'s have been warned of this. Some of us even signing "company papers" indicating immediate termination to anyone caught surfing.

Don't most employers block websites?

[Baseball_Fan]

Why make a policy that says "you can't read the newspaper at work" when it is easier to just block websites? It seems like those policies exist not because a company wants to penalize people for surfing the web, but because companies want to have a convenient excuse to fire people. I've had a sales job where the top salesperson was allowed to look at porn, buy food and bill the company, anything he wanted and for as long as he wanted. He landed a couple large accounts and managment was afraid of rocking the boat. A different salesperson who was at the bottom was fired for violating the company "no web surfing" policy for visiting yahoo sports to check his fantasy team (literally 5 minutes). Why couldn't they fire him for being bad at sales, why use the no web surfing policy?

My last job with internet access came with restrictive software that blocked most websites the company didn't want employees visiting. There was no news websites, no sports, no entertainment, no shopping. The company also activly added new websites to the filter when the IT people noticed surfing that wasn't explained by a company need. That seems like the better option than telling employees "don't surf". Instead, most people brought a copy of the local newspaper to read.

Re:Don't most employers block websites?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Why couldn't they fire him for being bad at sales, why use the no web surfing policy?

Because "bad at sales" is a subjective judgement of performance, which could require expensive litigation to defend. Also complicating this route is the fact that, if there were other sales people who were arguably "worse" than this person, but who weren't fired, it would then look bad for the employer if it went to court, especially if, say, the person fired was a minority of some sort and the person not-fired for same conduct wasn't.

"Hmm, you didn't fire salesman Y for the same performance, but you did fire salesman Z and he's [insert minority group here.]"

Termination for cause is a bear-trap... It is easier (and cheaper in the long run) to fire people for a black and white violation of policy rather than a debatable reason like "doing a bad job," even if the person REAAAALLY deserves it. Our VP of Finance told me about a year ago that was why we were writing an "employee handbook": To make firing people easier, since the lawyers rarely sign off on terminations for "doing a shitty job" anymore. Of course, that same person was fired for cause for gross-incompetence, so he might have been full of shit.

Time management

[Anonymous Coward]

I once read a book by an anally retentive time management consultant. Yes, that was his job. He would always have his watch set 3 minutes fast to "be ahead of the world", and would always make todo lists, and would always be doing something while waiting, and all that jazz.

The most ironic thing was that he said that he encouraged his employees to bring puzzles, books, needlepoint, or whatever they wanted to occupy their time when they were done with their work.

Why? Well, because people will stretch a project until the deadline or miss the deadline completely. By having a carrot in front of them saying "I can goof off when I'm done with this", he was able to tell when they were done with their tasks, and assign them a new one. He got more work out of these people by encouraging them to goof off than not.

Its just as irrational to assume that 100% of ones working time is going to be 100% productive work. Its more on the order of 10% to maybe 30% depending on the kind of work. Also, for a lot of white-collar and professional/skilled labor people, they do things and think about things outside of their work that helps them do better work.

How many slashdotters out there have private projects or even outside of work computing interests if you work on computers for a living? Doesn't this stuff help you at your job? If your job encouraged private projects, as Google does, do you think your job would be more fulfilling and productive?

Re:Headline is very misleading

[DavidinAla]

Since you're just being a smart aleck, there's no reason to take your question seriously, but it happens that I am familiar with the case. And, yes, I think the judge is wrong as a matter of law, not just common sense.

David

Re:Solitaire=internet?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"I can see if the guy was researching something online but he was goofing off."

In this case, you're probably right. However, I've gotten busted for this. My boss came in, saw me playing Solitaire, and geared up to yell at me. I minimized the window to reveal my computer was rendering. "IE eats too much RAM."
I was off the hook. Heh.

Down the road, we were encouraged to browse the web from time to time. Almost everybody at that office had something to gain by reading up on tech news sites and so forth. Even Slashdot was expressly allowed. (Although I doubt my boss would have OK'd that if she had ever wandered into the comments section.)

Re:I love my job!

[Edzor]

what i want to know is who the hell coined the phrase to "..surf the internet"? and did he die in a suitably painfully way?

As long as the person gets the work done...

[Tetard]

That is what matters: that they do the work they're paid to do it. If they spend their time surfing, and don't do the assigned tasks, then it's symptomatic of another problem. Looking at websurfing as a quality indicator is a sign that management doesn't know what its employees are doing.

Funnily enough, this comes from the US, which I seem to remember prides itself on being result-oriented (i.e.: looking at how the person and the company performs, not so much on how it's done) rather than process oriented (i.e.: as so-called old-fashioned Europe supposedly does).

Or maybe it's just that management is afraid of litigation from the employees because they might see (OMG!) breasts! Or ... NAKED PEOPLE!

My 0.02 EUR

Sounds resonable to me

[houghi]

Each and every case will most likely be different. Are you just browsing a bit around while others take their 10 minutes break, or are you do it 6 out of the 8 hours and the other two is at the coffee corner?

The importand question is if it was interfering with his job. I have been in situation where management did not provide enough work and still asked not to surf. It was allowed to bring a book and read. So I could buy Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling but not read http://houghi.org/Fun/hack12.txt

Re:Great

[linvir]

Bisexual. It's generally even more disliked than being gay (if you're male)

Bullshit. Back when gayage was illegal, being married was a sufficient defense against accusations of homosexuality. If someone tells me they're gay, I file them as "not like me"; someone tells me they're bisexual, I think "whatever, still likes girls".

It's only broody gays that dislike bisexuals, because they're jealous of their ability to pursue homosexuality without foregoing satisfaction of their primal desire to create more people. Everyone else, including homophobes and conservatives, is happy to delude themselves by focusing on their shared desire for read/write/execute access to vaginas.

Re:I love my job!

[way2trivial]

http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.buslib -l/msg/859202dfa2d24395?dmode=source&hl=en

Go ahead, try and find an older cite..

I leave looking into the details of his life up to you....

Solitare is a bit different than reading news

[brett880]

According to the article, this person was fired ultimately for playing solitare on the job after being told to stop surfing the net. I think playing games on the net on company time is a bit different than a quick peek at a news site or something similar....especially after being told not to spend time surfing. I can definitely understand him being fired for this.

Re:Not valid outside NY

[TheCarp]

So your going to completly ignore the nagitive impact on moral? Or how about the fact that now employees will need to actually take time off to do minor things that they otherwise could have taken just a few minutes out of their day to work on.

For example, I recently had to pay parking tickets in a few cities around here to reregister my car. I managed it by taking a few minutes here and there over the day to contact the towns via phone and then use their websites to pay electronically (sad that both were needed).

If port 80 traffic to non related sites was blocked (and good luck identifing all those sites, and hope you don't have anyone who actually needs the web for their job, like the technicians who fix PCs or pretty much anyone who might need to look up information or do research to put together some form of documentation), then I would have had to take an entire day off to run around and do all that.

Lets see... maybe an hour of lost productivity... compared with... an entire day of lost productivity. Yup, sounds like blocking port 80 "wins"

-Steve

Re:Seems like a no-brainer

[Acer500]

Reminds me of another Slashdot post that pointed out that it is really difficult to find the real productive people just by looking at that kind of indicators. A quiet person who works mostly office hours, takes a break to read the newspaper, surf the Web or play some game might seem less valuable than a glib articulate worker that stays overtime very often

However, I've seen that several of the first kind of workers actually do get their work done, are often way smarter/better qualified but have more difficulty expressing themselves and thus don't seem as good when viewed by upper management that sees a glib talker that might be clueless, and takes so much longer than the other to finish work that has to work extra hours (see joelonsoftware for some info he has on productivity related to programming in particular, which IMO can be applied to information workers in general). Also, the image which got me thinking about that recently, from a blog: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_us ers/2006/04/when_only_the_g.html

which I originally found here: http://www.businessinnovationinsider.com/2006/04/0 9-week/
Joelonsoftware's link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.h tml (very general but covers the topic briefly near the end. I can't find a more specific one ATM)