Interesting discussion

Kevin and Scott are having a discussion about employee’s doing some personal surfing at work. As an IT person, let me add my 2 cents to the discussion. This is what I tell new employees. I do monitor what you’re doing and while I don’t have time to watch and track every website you visit, I do have the technical ability to, so if someone wants to check up on you, you won’t know I’m looking and I’ll be watching everything. Now, does that mean that if you check the stock prices, or check the price on an item you’ve been thinking about buying that you’re going to get reported? No, because everyone does that to some extent. That sort of stuff is only going to get you in trouble if it’s keeping you from getting your job done, and then you’re going to be in hot water for not getting your job done, not just for surfing the web. The website tracking will just be our evidence for whatever discipline, but it won’t directly bring about the discipline.

On the other hand, there are certain online activities that will get you in big trouble by themselves. Surfing for porn, online gambling, running your own business using our equipment, or any other sorts of illegal activity. That sort of stuff is going to get reported the second I see it and track it to you.

Of course I don’t work in a production environment where you might take a much more severe approach to personal internet use, but I also doubt that production employees have much internet access to begin with. What do you think?

Similar Posts

  • |

    Linked – The Internet of Things has a dirty little secret

    “If Nest wanted to increase profits it could sell your home’s environment data to advertisers. Too cold? Amazon ads for blankets. Too hot? A banner ad for an air conditioner. Too humid? Dehumidifiers up in your Facebook.To be clear, that hasn’t happened yet but Nest already shares “anonymous” data with “partners” and Google just happens…

  • Office Space..

    I have fallen behind in my blog-reading this morning. I could tell you that it was because I had to run our monthly invoices, or because I had a problem monitor upstairs, but the truth be told, none of that took up as much time and mental energy as coming up with something witty to…

  • Doing things backwards

    While I was at the Office 2003 launch event last week, I was trying to think about ways our office could leverage the technology, what we could do with it, what sort of infrastructure changes we would need to make, what sort of cost savings it might generate, etc. All the things that I’m sure…

  • Home sweet home?

    Yeah I arrived back home Friday night, spent yesterday with my wife and some friends going to the Irish Festival and now, on Sunday, I’m back at work trying to install that replacement hard drive so I don’t have to try and do it while I deal with the 20 other things I have waiting…

  • The weekend

    I need a weekend. Well no, actually, I need to go back to being on vacation. That was fun, this is not. By the way, the big project for the normally slow summer around here has me sitting on the task force to develop an ethics policy for the organization. While I won’t be writing…

  • Terminations

    I was listening to the latest In The Trenches earlier today, and found myself nodding my head in agreement when Kevin was talking about knowing someone’s being let go and having to disable accounts as it’s happening. It is easily one of the worst parts of the job. It’s a sickening feeling knowing someone’s going…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)