Though we’ve had our share of lazy employees (none currently employed and no names of course), I’m going to stick up for employees and not employers on the internet issue.

One thing that these studies about personal use of internet activity during work never seem to show is what percentage of work are employees doing at home? Perhaps if the workplace is less confining and constraining, as Google has tried to make their workplace environment, employees will actually become more productive?

According to the study, 72.34 percent of all employee personal use of the Internet in the workplace has to do with “employee productivity
draining Web sites,” including the following types of sites in order of
highest use: shopping, entertainment, personal e-mail, sports, chat
rooms, job searches and game playing. This “employee productivity loss”
group accounts for 93.99 percent of personal use bandwidth costs for
employers.

Bandwidth costs are relatively negligble unless every employee is running P2P, so I’m not getting the focus on that in the study. And it’s not difficult for the sysadmin to shut down aggressive P2P activity on the corporate LAN so don’t blame the employees for what programs they are running just block or throttle excessive usage.

It is also easy and well-advised for employers to set deadlines for what work needs to be done by when and assess if said employee is screwing around reading blogs (imagine
that?) vs. getting their work done (unless of course reading blogs is part of their job).

The liability
This is an interesting scenario. If employee is gambling online during work hours could the employer really be held liable? I’m not sure I buy that they would, but if somebody reading has stats on this please let me know. Of course it depends on what type of job the employee was responsible for like say if they were supposed to watch a nuclear reactor and were embroiled in a game of Tetris instead. That conjurs up visions of Homer Simpson.

Bottom line: employers who are concerned about this issue should have some sort of internet policy to spell out the obvious things: don’t abuse network resources (heavy P2P), don’t use the internet for unlawful purposes (searching for illegal porn), but beyond that it’s a company by company decision on how much they want to get into people checking their email, favorite website and blogs. Really, how much time do the employees spend off the clock doing work for the company? In fairness, this time needs to be reconciled in any meaningful overview.

We don’t have an internet policy at our offline business and there hasn’t been a huge need to draft one. Wait, guess I just did in the paragraph above. I don’t care if our employees — past, present or future — use the internet for personal use on company time as long as they get their work done and service the customers. If solitaire someday becomes more important than answering the phone or servicing customers then we’ve got a problem.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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