Patching Leaks: Employee Internet Abuse
Thursday, October 13th, 2011While the internet is a vital tool for research or social media outreach in many industries, thousands and thousands of company hours and company electricity is sapped away by personal email correspondence, tweeting, designing family Christmas cards, shopping, stocking your eBay store, forwarding jokes and watching television shows. Although you may be sharp enough to not use your “work email” for dating site registration, you may still be busted if your company uses employee internet monitoring.
Essentially, your boss can’t see a snapshot of your computer screen or keystrokes, but can find out what sites you visited and for how long. While a sympathetic boss might not mind the occasional check of email, or even some entertainment on the lunch hour, if your job performance is slacking, they have hard proof on where your real focus was if the sites weren’t company or industry related.
Is this fair? In some ways, it could be construed as an invasion of privacy. However, if you are indeed using a company’s work station or a company-provided computer, you are essentially borrowing someone else’s equipment and need to act accordingly. Such software really mainly is used to detect trends.
With smartphones and even iPads, employees can discreetly conduct personal business. In that regard, monitoring software falls short if you are truly looking to keep track of all of an employee’s time. For the most part, if an employee is abusing company time on personal business, it will spill over into their use of the company copier and computers as well.
Do you tend to spend your work day sucked in by the internet, or have you managed to maintain the barrier of “personal” and “company” time?
