Who Surfs This Much Porn?
Last week, the District of Columbia fired nine government employees for clicking the mouse over 2,000 times apiece on internet porn. Not content with merely firing their staff, the district is set to discipline an additional 32 employees for surfing porn on the taxpayer's dime. According to examiner.com, the worst offender, took an eyeful an average of every 2.5 minutes.
The district uncovered the activity using porn-tracking software in combinatioin with a little hard drive forensics. The district plans to give itself a helping hand in the future by purchasing another 20,000 WebSense licenses at a cost of over $140,000.
With systemic in-house porn surfing, it is best to work things out in advance. Have your information technology guru adjust his or her antenna to periodically look for any such activity. Then you may nip the bud before things get out of hand. It is important to apply the handbrake before a problem arises by incorporating unequivocal policies against such activity into your employee handbook
In the event you discover any such handiwork, immediately implement the procedures outlined in your employee handbook. You may actually be giving your employees a helping hand if your handbook educates employees before a problem arises, rather than forcing you to discipline your staff down the road.
Brett Trout
Labels: employee monitoring, employment handbook, employment policies, pornography
posted by Brett Trout @ 1/29/2008 09:02:00 AM
3 Comments:
At 1/30/08 8:43 AM ,
Rush Nigut said...
Brett,
It is particularly important to make sure that your company handbook decreases the expectation of privacy in the event you are monitoring the employees' Internet use. You will want to let employees know the company owns all technology resources and that they have no expectation of privacy when they use those resources. Nice post.
Rush
At 1/30/08 3:18 PM ,
Brett Trout said...
Rush,
Good point. Thanks for the input. For more on employee expectation of privacy, be sure to check out this post:
http://blawgit.com/?p=237
Brett
At 2/14/08 7:21 PM ,
Ned said...
While I understand the issue with employers having their good names sullied through employees using company resources; the statistics mentioned also bring to my mind the reality that company productivity in general suffers because of employees spending much time on the internet. I have heard of companies tracking internet usage in general, flagging specific personal email sites, or greatly restricting usage in general for their employees. I assume that a certain amount of employee internet zone-out is acceptable as recreational and needed to allow cognitive recovery, but I wonder how a company can set a firm line on internet expectations while still selling themselves as flexible and open to the workforce of this Age.
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