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Unlock Internet or Risk Losing Staff?
Dan Warne writes "People don't want to work for employers who heavily restrict internet access, a senior Microsoft executive said in a keynote speech at the opening of Tech.Ed 2006 Sydney today. From the article: 'These kids are saying: forget it! I don't want to work with you. I don't want to work at a place where I can't be freely online during the day," said Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist Ann Kiera. She dubbed internet-wary employers "digital immigrants" and said the new wave of younger workers were "digital natives".'"
2) WTF from TFA:
*shakes head* Child abuse?
3) It's Anne Kirah, not Ann Kiera. I know she works at MS and has a ridiculous job title, but at least try to spell one of her names right.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The issue of internet access at work and its use is a curious one. We have been allowing people to use the telephone at work for years in a limited fashion. As long as it didn't invade the work day too much it was sort of accepted. It also generally wasn't recorded.
Internet is just telephone communications. No different. Treating it differently isn't wise. The employers are right though if the use gets out of hand.
There is of course the problem of not knowing what browsing is legitimate anyway. This isn't easy to determine either. Remember that clicking on a link might be accidentally the wrong one or you might be searching a topic and get one of those trick sites listed for the Porn types. It isn't really a matter of any or filters, it is a matter of content and time.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
So normally I sit down with a goal, I think about how to go about implementing it, I bang out the code, and then I have a few minutes of downtime (sometimes more) while the damn thing compiles. Now most of the time I use this time to think about the next step of the problem, or to jot down notes of possible issues to take a look at, or to finally get around to answering e-mails about other issues in the code, etc. but if none of these are pressing then I don't feel guilty at all browsing around online for a few minutes. As I write this I'm waiting for my first build of the day to finish so I can get started.
With a name like "ip_freely_2000" I kind of figure you're joking. However, I gotta say that that post sounds almost word for word like what my previous boss would have said on the issue.
That strong-armed attitude is definitely very prevalent in the business world and is exactly the kind of thing that demoralizes employees.
When I first started at that previous employer, I had a different boss... one who gave me room to do what needed doing. The result: I would regularly put in 60 to 80 hours per week (on salary). When the new boss (the one who I said sounded like your post) came in, he made it very clear that he was very much against comp time, telecommuting, and flex time. He wanted everyone there the same times... roughly for the reasons you mentioned. I went from 60 to 80 hours a week to watching that clock. I was in at 9:30 and out at 5:30 every day. If there was an emergency that required extra hours, my attitude and thus my performance were most definitely negatively affected.
If management treats their employees like children and creates an environment of monitoring and restrictions, they will find that morale and productivity decrease over-all. That kind of environment will not attract creative, energetic people, it will drive them away. Even in non-creative jobs, a bit of online shopping or visits to the DMV site or aonline bank sites keep people from having to take time off (cough, cough, I'm sick today) to take care of personal tasks that can't be done off-hours.
The Digital Sorceress
I have worked for two ends of the extreme, one company that was very restrictive with internet access and one that was wide open.
Working in IT I found the overly restrictive company made repairs and troubleshooting increasingly difficult since many times I had to research a problem at home and then fix it at work. I remember one incident where we had a scsi backplane go bad on a server that was out of waranty, they had a couple of lower techs hammer against it for 3 days before passing it to me. I looked at the error logs, ran some diagnostics and looked up some error codes, had the problem isolated in 10 minutes, but ended up getting written up for "using the internet" on company time. I found that after a while I did the bare minimum required not be fired since half the time I was doing busy work at home and the real work at home anyway.
The other company was a telco provider we had unrestricted access, it was great troubleshooting and repairs had an amazing turnaround time, but there were people that abused the priviledge. Eventually they weeded themselves out through poor performanace reviews or being called out for slacking off. Basically it comes down to what kind of employees you have, if they are responsible and take their job seriously internet access isnt a problem, its a matter of trust. If you dont trust your employees you either need better ones or perhaps need to find out what you may be doing that causes them to have no dedication to the job.
I see this all the time at my company, and in the long run, it leads to burnt-out employees. We've had much more success with staff retention and productivity my asking that employees do not work from home (to the point of canceling almost all of our GotoMyPC accounts), do not stay late (with exceptions, of course). If employees want to get their work done, they've got to do it during the work day. If they don't, well, they face the same situations that most employees who fail to meet their objectives face...
Work is work. As an employee (and this is the part of the legal definition according to the IRS, btw), your employer has the right to tell you how and when you do your job. If you want to work on your own schedule, you should be freelancing or consulting.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"Employees for one may be more likely to sit around browsing the web rather than doing the work they're assigned."
How about treating your employees like responsible adults instead of toddlers?
You know, if you don't chain employees to their desks, they might get up and wander around all day, instead of working.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
>Why do people expect to be given free internet access at work?
They also *gasp* make personal phone calls sometime. Sometimes to the babysitter or their spouse! We must implement a whitelist for the phone immediatly.
Seriously, work is a compromise. You want humans to work for you, then be prepared to meet them halfway on their social needs. Or watch yourself get a reputation for being an arrogant boss and a 'fascist company.' Talent will never come knocking at your door and you'll be stuck with people who love or can tolerate harsh policies. People who dont use the web as the resource that it is, people afraid to make a personal call, and people who end up in a stokholm-symdrome-like way defending these silly policies. Not to mention how competitive is a company with these draconian policies? In my experience its crappy little small business with paranoid micro-managing bosses who demand hardcode filtering.
Also, professional work is rarely sitting at a machine and putting in x amount of work like a typical blue collar job. Its collaberation and social skills. Its finding out new things. That means you need tools to communicate. That means there will be slow periods and downtimes. That means using the internet with as little restriction as possible.
Also, there's a real difference between a technological and social problem. If someone slacks on their job because of the internet (or any reason) it becomes obvious after a while. If this happens its not because you lack a decent filtering system its because you lack a good employee.
Lastly, if security is such a concern, I believe very few, if any, popular windows exploits work when the user doesnt have admin access. A simple security change like this, which is something that hsould have been done long ago, makes the web very safe. Blaming poor security practices on the web is just being silly.
I think it depends what you major in and what kind of skills you have.
It also depends on how picky you are in terms of what kind of work you'll do, or where you want to live. People who only want to work in a particular city (e.g. NYC, Boston, DC, etc.) or only want to do a particular sort of work, may well have the limited options that you describe. But such was not my experience, or that of other people I know. Granted it was a while back and the economy was a bit different then, but I definitely had a choice of places to work when I graduated college. But then again, I didn't have a lot of other requirements besides a paycheck: I was willing to relocate and travel, and my skills were fairly general.
Obviously, how much "say" a recent college grad has in where they end up working, changes radically depending on the economic environment. When companies are competing for new employees, as they were during the mid to late-90s, workplace perks become significantly more important than during a downturn, when the job itself is almost like a perk. And as I mentioned, the competition for employees differs radically from one region of the country to the other. A company in Boston might be beating college grads off their doormat with a stick, while one in Phoenix, Arizona might be desperately seeking young workers. It all comes down to tradeoffs.
I think that the internet access is similar to the attitudes companies had regarding dress codes a few years ago. Young employees saw suit-and-tie operations not only as personally restrictive, but also indicative of a corporate culture that they might not have liked; in response, a lot of places changed to "dress casual" over time. While we can argue about the merits of professional attire all day, there was definitely a lot of change as a result of companies trying to get rid of the stodgy appearance, and many of these improvments were aimed at recruiting new workers. Internet access could be similar: companies that don't restrict seem like they'd be better places to work, for reasons unrelated to the internet itself -- less overbearing management, more trust of employees, etc.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sounds like you've bought into the factory/robot mentality.
Working in a factory or in telephone support is different from working in a job which requires thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. People can't invent new solutions for things for 8 hours straight, with only a rigidly-timed lunch break. Our brains don't work like that.
Sure, if your job is flipping burgers and refilling soft drinks, it doesn't take much brain power to do that, and there's no reason to be goofing off on the job. Just turn your brain off and follow the routine, day in and day out. But if you're trying to devise creative solutions to complex problems, this simply isn't going to happen according to a rigid plan, timed to the minute.