Don't Let Your Boss Catch You Reading This

Stony Stevenson writes "iTnews is running a piece on the culture of cyberslacking in the business arena. Studies worldwide suggest employees spend about a fifth of their work shifts engaging in personal activities. Most of that 'wasted time' is, of course, spent online. From the article: 'A recent survey by online compensation firm Salary.com showed about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work. About 34 percent listed personal Internet use as the leading time-wasting activity in the workplace. Employees said they did so because they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work. Firms all over the world are concerned about potentially harmful effects of surfing they deem to be inappropriate may have on their company's image.'"

Comments

Easy solution! Or is it?

[Verteiron]

My bosses fixed this by having me implement an unavoidable proxy server with a whitelist of approved sites. If you want to get onto a site that's not on the list, a manager must approve the site. Needless to say, anything not work related (including news, weather, banking sites, etc) are not on the list. Oh, and they're not playing Solitaire, either, thanks to the group policies in place that prevent the running of sol.exe and all other Windows games. And it's not like they're going to download new ones.

Problem solved, says management, who are not subject to the filter!

Of course all the employees resent being treated like children, and it's created a tremendous amount of ill will toward management, and people gripe about it all the time. At least one good employee switched companies because of the restrictive policy. But hey, at least they aren't wasting time on the 'net!