Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Our simple answer:
"We don't take requests from department managers".
At our shop, requests for such information come from the HR director or the General Manager and only those people. And such information is provided to them and them alone. Such rules make our lives easier. HR and/or the GM workout what to do with the department head -- solutions which may involve IT or not.
Such requests are rare now. They are usually handled by the supervisor alone now without need of escalation.
...and, as part of our corporate policy, any employee you request browsing history on will get a copy of YOUR browsing history.
I would guess that would limit requests.
- Tony
This goes for granting read access to other's email.
If your company pays for the internet access and for the machines the employees are using to access the internet, it would be foolish to feel they have any right to privacy. I don't like the idea of higher ups being able to see what I've been doing online, but I understand that since I'm using the company's internet connection and their computer (and their electricity, and the time I'm being paid to work) they can snoop in at any time. God save us all if they discover how much time people spend on /.
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
It sounds to me like the managers don't have enough to do and are wasting their time micromanaging employees.
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.
It takes real time to develop a culture in a workplace. If your culture is such that managers are looking for evidence of "slacking" to try to motivate them or replace them, then you are probably looking at a lost cause. The only thing I can recommend is a well written letter to someone high up in the company about the dangers of an adversarial workplace culture and the resulting brain drain and poor quality.
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?"
Any manager that needs to look at logs like this for their employees is incompetent and dragging your company down. A good manager provides positive incentives for employees and creates loyalty both to himself and to the company by treating employees like people. The only reason to consider removing an employee is if they are not getting their job done. If this is the case, then they should be able to tell him why. If he does not trust them, he should find someone else regardless of what a log says.
Treating your employees as mercenaries will make them act that way. Why should they give 2 weeks notice if they're leaving? Why shouldn't they steal office supplies if they can get away with it. Why shouldn't they make a copy of your customer database or defect to the competition? If money is all you are offering, then you can always be outbid.
One thing you might want to consider and which might be able to pull you company out of its cultural death spin is moving drastically from secret monitoring to complete openness. Make an announcement to the whole company that internet monitoring is being applied and then open the system up to everyone. Managers will be able to see what sites their employees visit, but employees will be able to see what sites their bosses visit and when and for how long. We have such a system here, and every now and again we'll announce in a meeting the person who wasted the most time on Slashdot that month.
With such a move to openness i does not seem so much like an us versus them arrangement, but rather an even playing field for all. It works for us, but then we also have a very progressive culture of treating employees well and avoiding micro management. People take on responsibilities and the only problem is if they don't live up to them. No one cares if I post on Slashdot in the middle of the day, so long as I get my work done and it is of sufficient quality. It may be too late where you work, however. You might want to seriously consider looking for an employer that is smarter.
Thank God my bosses believe me when I describe Slashdot as a tech reference site and I am in charge of any network monitoring we might do.
:)
We were told at one company that I worked at that the supervisors had the ability to spy on our desktops to see what we're doing. A new supervisor rushed over to my cube to tell me that looking at Amazon was against company policy and he caught me red handed (it was still on the screen after being there for only a minute). I pointed out that 1) I was on my break with a breakfast burrito in hand, 2) the entire company knows I get stuff delivered from Amazon, and 3) my last supervisor gave me an Amazon gift certificate at the completion of my last project. He went off mad when I told him to bugger off. This is the same management team that couldn't find the computer that had 300+ virus/trojan horses/spyware that kept bringing down the network every three days for the past month.
:P
Besides, I did all my non-work web browsing on my PDA using the wireless link from the company next door. Do you know how hard it was to type a Slashdot comment on a tiny virtual keyboard?
I was reading an article a while back about how more and more employees are coming to either expect, or desire as a perk, unfettered internet access.
I wonder if anyone has done a study or survey of how much employees value their internet access, and what kind of pay cut they'd be willing to take for it, or what kind of pay bump they would require to move to a company that didn't offer it.
Right now it might seem like a minor issue -- in many tech fields, there are enough candidates that employers can dictate terms to their employees, and employees are sufficiently discouraged by the thought of finding a new job, that they won't tell them to suck eggs and walk away. However, in a tighter market this might not be the case. I could easily see a situation where a company might decide that it's cheaper to offer unfettered internet access (and swallow the cost of the productivity hit) rather than pay extra in order to recruit and retain people who are willing to work under more limited conditions.
I've thought about what it's worth to me, and I think I would probably accept working in a secure area (where there's no public net access) for about a 5% pay increase; any less than that, and I'd probably say no. If they just started blocking web traffic tomorrow in my current position, I probably wouldn't quit immediately, but it would certainly factor into my list of things that I don't particularly like. At some point when that list got long enough, I'd find another job.
Everything's a trade-off, both from the employer's perspective and the employee's.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
at my current company for this reason. I work for a p0rn company and they have a policy against using the internet for non-work related stuff. I got a warning for reading cnn.com.
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