Behind the walls of his cubicle at a global insurance firm, he spent hours on end surfing the Internet. As co-workers strolled busily by, he brazenly ogled porn sites, his monitor tilted so if anybody happened to stop by they would not immediately notice the naked women splayed on his screen. And if a visitor decided to linger, all he needed to do was close his web browser.
It went on for months, day after day after day. It was against corporate policy, and he knew it. But still, he found the illicit images too alluring to ignore.
What he didn’t know — or knew and ignored at his peril — was that the tech staff at the company were logging every minute he spent online, as they were for every one of the thousands of workers in the company who had Internet access.
It wasn’t long before his compulsion propelled him into the top five of web users company-wide, a distinction that quickly earned him notoriety with human resources staff who monitored the reports.
They had the tech staff watch the sites he was visiting and check his hard drive — the trail of porn was hard to ignore.
“He was in chat rooms, all kinds of inappropriate stuff — to the point that you had to wonder how was he getting his work done because he was spending so much time on the Internet,” remembers Sharon Gerrits, who worked on the human resources staff and agreed to be interviewed on condition the firm’s name not be revealed.
The man was fired. Two others who had accumulated scores of hours in personal surfing time at the office but not dabbled in porn or other banned sites were warned that further violations of company policy would not be tolerated.
As website use on the job has escalated, so has monitoring by corporate bosses fearful that surfing will not just erode productivity, but that inappropriate use could open the company to legal action and other headaches. According to research firm International Data, around 30 to 40 percent of lost employee productivity can be traced to workers’ personal use of the Internet.
More and more, snooping software is being used to ward off potential problems such as harassment suits, protect against unfair-dismissal complaints, and guard against scandal.
Snooping software is what led Joey (not his real name), a former employee at an uptown Charlotte financial institution, to be shown the door.
“I was fired because they said I was spending too much time surfing the web,” explains Joey. “It wasn’t porn or anything, just a lot of different sites — travel, Amazon, some political blogs, stuff like that. They’re right, though, I was spending a lot of time at work on the web, but if they’d ever given me enough work to keep me busy it wouldn’t have happened. It turns out they were monitoring several of us and I got popped.”
Joey’s company knows that computing has made it possible to boost productivity in the office, but it’s also opened the door to greater temptations for abuse: bored workers have more time-wasters at their fingertips, malicious ones have more options for undermining their bosses or colleagues, and employers can use the same technology to electronically spy on what their staff are doing.
As website use on the job escalates, so has monitoring by corporate
bosses fearful that surfing will erode productivity and lead to legal action
and other headaches.
Personal use of the Internet at work is often dubbed cyberslacking and is widespread.
Instead of chatting over the water cooler, workers are swapping emails or instant
messages. Instead of going shopping on their lunch hour, employees stay at their
desks and hit their high-speed connections.
According to a survey done by the online career site Vault (www.vault.com), seven in 10 workers use the office Internet to hit news sites and one in four use it for shopping. A third engage in financial trading at their desks, while 13 percent download music and 4 percent surf for porn (or at least that’s how many admitted it).
A third of all employees surveyed admit to an hour or more a day of personal surfing and another three in 10 confess that their web adventures and personal emails decrease their productivity on the job.
More than half say they have been caught.
The figures cited above may make it appear that employers have an airtight case for snooping on their employees’ Internet habits, but a revealing study conducted in Maryland suggests otherwise. The survey by the Center for e-Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and Rockbridge Associates, Inc. found that workers’ relationship to the web is more complicated than many employers think. The Maryland study found that Americans actually spend more time on the Internet at home for work purposes : an average of 5.9 hours per week : than they spend on the Internet at work for personal reasons (an average of 3.7 hours per week). In other words, the Internet seems to have a net effect of shifting work to the home more than shifting personal activities to work. In any case, the study confirms what many sociologists have been saying for years: the line between work and home is becoming more blurred, especially in the case of Internet usage, making productivity harder to track or predict.In general, however, employers have turned up the heat on cyberslackers, and employee privacy has suffered. Old rules that determined what employers can and can’t monitor have vaporized in a new atmosphere of routine observation and patchy legal protections.
A study looking at the monitoring practices of nearly 200 American companies found that 26 percent of managers monitored employees’ online activities all the time, not just when something gave them a reason to investigate.
At the same time, a quarter of the organizations surveyed by Bentley College’s Centre for Business Ethics have no procedures or safeguards to ensure that corporate snooping isn’t abused. What’s more, almost half of the firms lack written guidelines, policies or procedures for monitoring. According to ZDNet Australia, a new bandwidth-monitoring system could lead to employees who surf the Net at work receiving a bill each month for the cost of borrowed bandwidth and wasted time.
Most analysts, however, say employees should be cut some slack when it comes to personal Internet use. After all, the types of people that many firms want to attract — computer savvy 20-somethings — are precisely the group of people who would be repelled by companies’ heavy-handed policies.
Randolph Kahn, an internationally recognized risk consultant and lawyer, recommends to his corporate clients that they create clearcut, black-and-white policies about acceptable use to avoid trouble.
The case of Dow Chemical is a “perfect example.” In 2002, a female employee complained that all the men working around her were calling up porn and transmitting the photos by email.
“She said she was tired of it and it was a violation of company policy. She brought it to the attention of company executives and the next day they summarily fired 50 people and put dozens of others on leave,” says Kahn, author of the recently released Information Nation: Seven Keys to Information Management Compliance.
Stellar Internet Monitoring, one of many companies offering software or services to track workers’ online activities, has seen its business grow by 20 percent a year. Stellar uses electronic sniffers to watch net traffic for its corporate clients and automatically generate usage reports for each employee. It tracks not just email and web surfing, but instant messages swapped across connections. The results of the tracking are stored for several years — just in case.
Its president, Don Innis, knows of a case where a union filed a grievance, looking to get workers more time off at Christmas because company executives with Internet access were spending hours gift shopping online. It demanded the workers get equal shopping time during their workday.
“Certainly people shouldn’t be, in December, shopping on the Internet for hours. Normally people who have access to the Internet are some of your better employees. Some of these people are getting paid a lot.”
Gerrits, the former staffer at the insurance firm that fired the porn collector, says the company tried to take a balanced approach after it introduced general access to the Internet in 2000.
“When we introduced the Internet we said, ‘We’re giving this to you, we’re going to treat you like adults. If it’s your lunch break and you have to buy plane tickets, go ahead and do that. But don’t cut into your work time.'”
Keri Spooner, a senior lecturer in employment relations and human resource management, says firms should have clear policies. But she suggests going too far will hurt the company.
“Successful organizations — or those seeking success — require motivated and intelligent staff. They do not require obedient slaves. Individuals faced with no freedom of action will soon move on,” Spooner says.
“Moreover, the law in advanced economies generally recognizes the right of individuals to ‘reasonable’ communications with family and friends during working hours. In this respect, the Internet is no different from the access to a newspaper or to a telephone during working hours.” The Internet is also a vast resource of knowledge that smart firms will want their workers to have access to, Spooner says.
In fact, some companies are helping employees use the Internet rather than trying to limit them. According to Investor’s Business Daily, “Whirlpool and Eddie Bauer are among the firms that have set up Web portals designed to meet employees’ needs. Through these portals, employees can access the sites necessary to conduct personal business such as planning a wedding or applying for a mortgage loan. The firms argue that much of the personal business employees conduct can be taken care of only during normal business hours. If employees do not use the Internet to conduct that business, they will likely do so over the telephone, which can be an even more time-consuming process.”
John Lenarcic, a recognized expert in the field, and a lecturer in the School of Business Information Technology at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, says that computers in the workplace have allowed employees to do their work faster, obliging their bosses to find more for them to do. The vicious circle repeats itself.
“When faced with limitless knowledge, can we switch off our innate curiosity as thinking beings?” Lenarcic says. “In my opinion, putting blinkers on Internet access in the workplace could stifle creativity.
“A lot of companies pay big bucks to send employees on lateral-thinking courses and the like. These types of training courses foster subjunctive thinking that encourages divergent approaches to problem solving. The Internet is an ocean of stimuli to incite creative thought in workers.”
John Grooms contributed to this article.
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.
