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Nobody knows you surf the web at work, right? |
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Written by Sharon Dunn
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Wednesday, 14 June 2006 |
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Page 1 of 3  Quit asking yourself. They know.
A nifty little report can tell employers just how much time their employees are playing online poker, shopping e-Bay, even filling out their brackets on the Final Four or reading about the war in Iraq. And, chances are, bossman (or woman) is looking. The information is at their fingertips.
Recent reports suggest they should. One report from Salary.com states companies paid out $759 billion to employees last year for on-the-clock Web surfing and other office time-wasters.
“The amount of time that employees who have unrestricted Internet access spend surfing is far more than you might believe,” said Ted Warner, president of Connecting Point, 2401 A. 17th St., Greeley, which monitors and sells filtering systems for businesses. It’s amazing how much time surfing can waste, he said.
In a Websense Inc. report of 500 people nationwide this spring, 65 percent of men and 58 percent of women admitted to visiting sites not related to work while on the clock. Men admitted to surfing 2.3 hours per week while women admitted to 1.5 hours per week.
“The big joke used to be the person sitting there filing their nails or getting on the phone to talk with their friends,” said Larry Wood, president of Union Colony Bank in Greeley. “Now, I get a report every month that tells me who is on the computer playing video games and how long they’re doing it.”
It may sound a bit big-brotherish to monitor Internet usage, but companies have a lot to protect. It costs them money with each new user, and bad things are out there in cyberspace waiting to be downloaded that can disable a company’s entire system. Companies will spend thousands each year to protect their systems with firewalls and filtering devices.
“The problem with going to many sites is that you can infect your company’s network,” Warner said. “You may expose your company’s network to spyware, viruses, trojans, any of those things that can impede what your company’s network can do and eventually bring it down.”
The growth of the Internet’s use in business applications has fueled these concerns. And, as our culture becomes more Internet driven, people tend to turn to the Internet for information rather than read a book on their breaks, said Steve Rains, IT System Director for Banner Health Western Region.
Weld County’s system, called Websense, helps the county block access to some Internet sites based on a person’s job description. The system also filters some sites, allowing access for only an hour a day, said Anita Scrams, IT Manager for Weld County. The system logs every attempt to get to a bad site, as well, something some department managers can learn about regularly.
Warner said of the 60-70 businesses they monitor and filter, the record for one employee trying to log onto a blocked site was 126 times in one day, each time getting a message that the site was blocked.
Hall-Irwin Corp. is increasingly moving toward Internet-based applications, such as accounting, which means more employees online all the time. Administrators say they don’t have time to police every worker, so they’ll be adding a template filter to their firewall soon that blocks access to a variety of Web sites.
“For the most part, we’ve got people who pretty much use the Internet for work purposes, and some may get on Cabela’s or 9news to check the weather or news,” said Michael Job, corporate systems manager for Hall-Irwin. “It would take us much more time in management time to block those things.”
But there emerge patterns of use that catch Job’s attention.
“With the Final Four in basketball season, we had a lot of employees who would go and fill out their brackets,” Job said. “Those types of things, it’s not immoral, it’s just a time-sink. To discourage that, we do block some of the online sports where people are spending company time gathering information to do with their Final Four brackets.”
While many companies block and limit access, many agree that day-to-day monitoring of Web surfing would take a full-time employee — not a likely prospect when margins are getting slimmer. Many have to rely on employees’ supervisors.
“We don’t want to manage our employees electronically,” said Chris Hudson, public relations specialist for State Farm Colorado. “We try to manage through individual relationships.”
For Wood the answer is simple, though not one he employs: “If you don’t want employees on the Internet, don’t give them access. Do I want people wasting time? No. But, the fact that it’s on the Internet is no different than if they sat there and twiddled their thumbs. It’s still a waste of time. They’re letting me know they have some time on their hands.”
Knowing that gives managers some tools, Wood said.
“If they’re doing something like that, it means their job isn’t very satisfying, it’s more of a symptom than a problem,” Wood said. “If I haven’t created the work environment where they can be productive for eight hours” then that’s my fault.
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