Reporting on Your Employees' Internet Access?

kooky45 asks: "My team has recently installed content filters for my company which restrict the web sites that employees can visit. It also logs the sites they do visit; not whole URLs, just the site domain names. This has been useful for a couple of disciplinary investigations of employees suspected of wrongdoing. However, word has got round to some managers that this capability exists. They are starting to ask my team to provide lists of sites that their team members have accessed over the past few weeks, claiming they are suspicious of time wasting on the Internet and need proof. We're pushing back because of privacy concerns but the pressure is building on us. We have no experience in this area, and I'd like to ask Slashdot how other companies handle this, what the important considerations are, and where it could all go wrong?"

Comments

Re:Our solution

[RingDev]

Agreed. Our situation is similar. The information is tracked, but you need to be in senior management to get the reports.

-Rick

Re:We do this.

[Noodles_HK]

Ditto. However, we do perfer that the request is sent by a "director" level manager before we send out the report, so that more the one person knows about the existance of a particular report concerning a particular employee. We don't jump for anyone who has some type of supervisory title / job function.

This goes for granting read access to other's email.

Report time/# sites

[Salvance]

My company reports the estimated time spent online and # of sites to managers that request the information, but does not report the sites themselves. The company owners are the only ones outside of IT that can view the names of sites visited ... and then only a list of blocked sites by user.

Give them an inch

[porkThreeWays]

Basically, as someone else said, these sorts of things should be funnelled through your HR dept. Any investigation that could result in disicipline of an employee should go through HR. It isn't up to you guys to determine what requests are legit or not. There needs to be a central channel that all investigitory requests concerning employees has to go through. 99% of the time that's an HR dept. If a union got wiff of what's going on, you might be in the beating end of the union stick.

Re:Company owns the internet access

[Jhon]

Employees slack off at work

They certainly dont do so regularly if they wish to remain employees. What we have here, I think, is a difference in opinion of what amount of slack is acceptable.

well they are flat out idiots and i am willing to bet, have extremely high turn over rates.

My department staff (about 8) range from 8 years to as recent as 6 months ago. Most have been with us for over 4 years. For a department that picked up most of it's staff 4 years ago, I think we're doing well. BTW, the 6 month hire was an add-on. We needed addtional staff -- our company is still growing.

Those no down time employees, usually burn out and come back with an AR15

Who said "no downtime"? Clearly, "down time" is mandated by California Law. If you NEED more down time than 15 minutes every 2 hours, (more than 10% of your time spent in "down time"), then I think the problem is clearly with you and I certainly wouldn't consider you for hire -- or if you somehow passed through, I wouldn't keep you past probation.

Re:Find a New Job

[SmurfButcher Bob]

> I don't consider Slashdot a waste of time.

Depends, doesn't it? What if you're a cashier in a quickie-mart? A guy who shovels boxes into trucks at Fedex? An airline pilot, flying the plane?

Extreme examples (intended), but... clearly there are cases where the intar-tube has absolutely zero relevence, to the point of (possibly) being detrimental. Personal time during a break? That's a different story - and is more appropriate to the "coke machine" and "cable TV" examples. Off break & on duty? Not so clear-cut.

(And if you're curious, my solution to all of this is to use a couple retired "beater boxes", completely divorced and on their own cablemodem, located *in the call center itself* to provide access during breaks. This allows users to do whatever they wish - but it is socially policed. Oddly, the users are actually harder about who-uses-what-and-where-they-go-and-when-they-do-i t than I would be; if Sally is at a beater box and not on break, the rest of the agents know they are picking up her slack. And believe me, they'll voice their displeasure to her. Likewise if she takes a risk that bones the box - they don't have any inntarweb until I fix it a few days later. Again, she won't repeat that behavior. So, it works well, and they like it!)