Monitoring Your Employee's Internet Use

Right now, without personal internet monitoring in their workplace, most people will send a few personal emails; take care of some banking, or shopping throughout the day, without much thought to whether they are breaking any rules. It is the same thing with phone calls. Most employees feel entitled to this (unwritten) benefit partly because it is a way of evening up the little extras they feel they don't get paid for or recognized for and are not in their job descriptions: such as taking a late lunch because of a deadline, staying a little late when you were actually scheduled to leave early, and just being there for the company when you really don't have to. Other employees feel entitled because most companies today have just accepted this issue to be the norm.

If you were to permit employee's personal internet time only on their breaks and lunch time; you would have to establish specific times for each employee, so that you could have the structure to enforce this rule. Each person's lunch and breaks would have to be monitored in an almost robot like fashion, which employees do not appreciate at all. The managers would then have to police these rules and regulations; on top of an overloaded work day already. Confronting or terminating employees will have to be done totally within the letter of the law. New laws would have to be instigated because there would be "new rules".

One of the biggest hidden disadvantages of personal internet monitoring is not only the Pandora's Box you are opening; but what will you do with the information once you have opened it. If you are able to track every individual's activity you may also be shocked at what you find. Even if you take out the obvious pornography and the like, sometimes people do strange things; that you may not be aware of and you may just not want to know. If a person is frequently visiting a site associated with criminal activity do you call the authorities? What is going to be the different disciplines between the executive on a gambling site and the secretary on an Al-anon Forum? What if someone was on a personal site for 3 minutes after their break ended; is there a time limit? What do you do when you find out your top employee is on twitter for at lease 6 hours every day? Of course there are another 3 million other scenarios we could come up with, but you get the point, "too much information" is usually a burden.

If the "Jeannie is already out of the Bottle" it is impossible go back and start over with better rules in place. The people who like to take advantage of the time they are on the clock are going to be the ones to target, but it's not a simple issue of either good or bad behavior.