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?

Follow these topics: Uncategorized