Reporting on Your Employees' Internet Access? 130
kooky45 asks: "My team has recently installed content filters for my company which restrict the web sites that employees can visit. It also logs the sites they do visit; not whole URLs, just the site domain names. This has been useful for a couple of disciplinary investigations of employees suspected of wrongdoing. However, word has got round to some managers that this capability exists. They are starting to ask my team to provide lists of sites that their team members have accessed over the past few weeks, claiming they are suspicious of time wasting on the Internet and need proof. We're pushing back because of privacy concerns but the pressure is building on us. We have no experience in this area, and I'd like to ask Slashdot how other companies handle this, what the important considerations are, and where it could all go wrong?"
We do this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Our employee AUP specifically states that the company equipment belongs to the company, and there should be no expectation of privacy. It also states we perform monitoring of Internet and email activity. All employees are required to agree to the policy before they are granted access. Supervisors occasionally do request reports from our logs when they're trying to determine how productive their employees are. This is one of the reasons we have the logging in place.
Re:We do this. (Score:4, Informative)
This goes for granting read access to other's email.
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My line with most monitoring and lockdown requests is that it's a management issue, using the IT Department to control your staff builds resentment towards IT and often punishes other members of staff when all it would take to solve is a quiet word with the individual concerned.
Jason.
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Our solution (Score:5, Insightful)
"We don't take requests from department managers".
At our shop, requests for such information come from the HR director or the General Manager and only those people. And such information is provided to them and them alone. Such rules make our lives easier. HR and/or the GM workout what to do with the department head -- solutions which may involve IT or not.
Such requests are rare now. They are usually handled by the supervisor alone now without need of escalation.
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-Rick
Re:Our solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it is the company's equipment, but with the flurry of crazy litigation and legislation, it's better for all parties if there is a defined, followed policy.
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A somewhat complex issue (Score:2, Interesting)
How much is it worth? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if anyone has done a study or survey of how much employees value their internet access, and what kind of pay cut they'd be willing to take for it, or what kind of pay bump they would require to move to a company that didn't offer it.
Right now it might seem like a minor issue -- in many tech fields, there are enough candidates that employers can dictate terms to their employees, and employees are sufficiently discouraged by the thought of finding a new job, that they won't tell them to suck eggs and walk away. However, in a tighter market this might not be the case. I could easily see a situation where a company might decide that it's cheaper to offer unfettered internet access (and swallow the cost of the productivity hit) rather than pay extra in order to recruit and retain people who are willing to work under more limited conditions.
I've thought about what it's worth to me, and I think I would probably accept working in a secure area (where there's no public net access) for about a 5% pay increase; any less than that, and I'd probably say no. If they just started blocking web traffic tomorrow in my current position, I probably wouldn't quit immediately, but it would certainly factor into my list of things that I don't particularly like. At some point when that list got long enough, I'd find another job.
Everything's a trade-off, both from the employer's perspective and the employee's.
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Re:How much is it worth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly, I think there should be an expressed expectation of privacy, or level thereof. I expect that my employer wouldn't put a camera in the bathrooms. I think what keeps some from doing so is the letter of the law and the blanket coverage of all employees, including those responsible for the cameras. But I'm not going to bother to find and quote any decisions. My employer has a stated computer useage requirements. It is intentionally vague, but not beyond most people's comprehension. For instance, it doesn't identify the web filtering in place, but specifically prohibits circumventive behavior. I'm not happy about this as I don't agree with the filtering of sites like the wikipedia as personal pages. But I hardly find it reason enough to find other work.
But the expectation of entitlement to anything not compensated for is rediculous. The idea that only the educated have bargaining power is rather ignorant. Your assertion that companies will lose out on the best employees seems to imply that because it decided to settle for less than the best that it will fail. My employer is a prime example of the contrary. This may be true when applied to entities of different sizes, say an accounting office with ten people might have greater friction and turnover over something as simple as web filtering. But even it would not instantly go out of business due to restictive uses.
The only variable that ultimately affects any business is money. People will put up with a lot of unnecessary shit for the right price. That is the double edge sword of getting what you pay for. Pay peanuts, expect elephants.
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I won't speak for the GP, but this was my original point -- people will put up with anything if you pay them enough. I'm sure somewhere, you could find people who would be willing to let you beat them with a rubber hose on a daily basis; they'd just be very expensive. (If they had any other skills besides 'will allow self to be beaten regularly.')
The question then is, if you
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If you have kids renting movies or pumping gas all day, then they aren't going to quit because you changed the password to you AOL dial up account. They don't get paid enough to care about internet access. So in the end, I
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Unfettered internet access makes no sence in an employment situation. Once mobile connections get cheap enough, all the employees will end up playing with their own personal pdas, privately, all day long instead ;).
Tell them, "sure!" (Score:5, Funny)
I would guess that would limit requests.
- Tony
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I love it!
I ussed to work in retail, our store was horribly slow and our POSs had internet access (with not to much restriction), so we all sat around and played flash games, tooled about on MySpace, or read webcomics (that was me). Every so often our manager would yell at us for doing it, and we would ignore him.
However I made the amusing (and disturbing) discovery that our boss was surfing porn in the back room (was poking through the history for something I had looked up the day before). It was fill
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Company owns the internet access (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Company owns the internet access (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm fairly certain I could find someone who can be as productive as you when you are working -- the entire day (sans scheduled breaks) with your skill set who doesn't find it necessary to spend 10 mins playing a flash game to let something "sink in". Unless your flash playing/sink-in time and 5 some odd
I'm not tryi
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and who wants to work for someone that is that out of touch with reality. Employees slack off at work, if someone does not understand that concept, well they are flat out idiots and i am willing to bet, have extremely high turn over rates.
Those no down time employees, usually burn out and come back with an AR15...
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They certainly dont do so regularly if they wish to remain employees. What we have here, I think, is a difference in opinion of what amount of slack is acceptable.
My department staff (about 8) range from 8 years to as recent as 6 months ago. Most have been with us for over 4 years. For a department that picked up most of it's staff 4 years ago, I think we're doing well. BTW, the 6 mo
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They are slacking off when they are not supposed to be, shocking I know, but that is life.
You will easily see if they are slacking too much because their work will just plain suck and they will get fired, but to think they are not slacking when they shouldnt be, that is laughable.
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Perhaps you didn't understand this when I first said "What we have here, I think, is a difference in opinion of what amount of slack is acceptable."
I never suggested you said "all day". Nor did I suggest "no slack" what so ever.
If you follow up the thread, with regards to one of the GPs, you'll notice my gripe was with the need to spend fairly excessive amounts of t
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Then again, I'm pretty good at hiring. We don't really have a "slack" problem in my department.
Uh huh. Keep telling yourself that. My guess is your employees are just better at "looking busy" all the time. Or maybe they all overwork themselves and wind up making dumb mistakes they wouldn't have if they "slacked". What a pissant little boss you must be. I feel sorry for your employees.
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Sure they always like to say I'm paying you to do something.
when actually
I'm doing something to get paid. It is my choice not theirs.
My suggesti
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It's just been my experience that there are plenty of people out there who DON'T require thinking "down time", who are exceptionally productive and more often than not, less troublesome employees. What you are describing sounds to me to be stress coping rather than thought processing -- which, as management -- suggests to me you have poor stress coping skills or are more prone work poorly under work-related pressure.
And it's been my experience that the type of control-freak management style that you seem to
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Wow. You have an amazing ability to put words in the mouths of others -- words they never said! Good job!
Seriously, your criticism is weak and suggests you have no management skills or experience. Particularly obvio
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The fact that you think people in highly creative disciplines like programming should only take "scheduled breaks" speaks loads about your management style.
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First, you are misreading my post. Second, I'm sure you are unfamiliar with California Labor Law which, as I've stated in this thread, is fairly strict about work breaks and there is not much wiggle-room. If your gripe is with "scheduled breaks", complain to Sacramento about their rules, not to me about my management style.
Also, how did the topic get
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No. Because your attempt to narrow the field down to programmers -- who are typically either exempt, 1099, or sub-contracted out -- as some crazy example about how wrong I am. Either you were deliberately narrowing the profession down to something silly (thus being intellectually dishonest) in a piss-poor attempt at a reductio ad absurdum while committing a strawman, *OR* you dont know anything you are talking about. I figured you were mo
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California Labor Law requirements are fairly strict (with a bit of wiggleroom, but not much) on when breaks must be provided.
Blame Sacramento. I'd like a government that treated it's citizens as adults.
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Whether it had been necessary to step in or not, they would have. They're government, after all.
Blame still lies with Sacramento!
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Seriously, though... unless you're talking about managing people in some menial non-creative job, you're not going to get results that way. You can't demand creativity on the spot. Sometimes people have to sit and mull stuff over. And by the way, the fact that you use the phrasing, "when you need a little breaky-wakey from your oh so stressful day" shows that you have no idea how to work with people who actually do creative work. My original post was nothing about t
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And I also agree with Skreems. In fact, the employee behaviour should not be defined by such foolish rules, but by common sense and honesty.
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If your company pays for the telephone access and for the telephones the employees are using to access the telephone network, it would be foolish to feel they have any right to privacy.
Do you have any problems with the boss listening in on phone conversations? Or just a list of numbers dialed.
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but basically, this monitoring business is just a replacement for common sense, ie at the end of the day, did the employee get his shit done...that is all that matters. but instead you get managers who think they will suddenly be in touch with employees by monitoring their internet usage, instead of just paying attention to the quality of the work.
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It's not foolish at all to expect a right to reasonable privacy at work. On the contrary, it's common sense.
Morally, any reasonable employer must accept that they are employing human beings and not machines, that human beings have certain expectations about privacy, and that our culture today makes it all but certain that occasional personal use of phones, web sites and the like will be necessary during working hours.
Legally, I know the US sucks here, but in the UK for example, the Office of the Informa
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Report time/# sites (Score:2, Informative)
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HR policy (Score:4, Insightful)
Also pop in the managers usage as well - as someone else pointed out.
Managers (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a New Job (Score:5, Insightful)
However, word has got round to some managers that this capability exists. They are starting to ask my team to provide lists of sites that their team members have accessed over the past few weeks, claiming they are suspicious of time wasting on the Internet and need proof.
It takes real time to develop a culture in a workplace. If your culture is such that managers are looking for evidence of "slacking" to try to motivate them or replace them, then you are probably looking at a lost cause. The only thing I can recommend is a well written letter to someone high up in the company about the dangers of an adversarial workplace culture and the resulting brain drain and poor quality.
We're pushing back because of privacy concerns but the pressure is building on us. We have no experience in this area, and I'd like to ask Slashdot how other companies handle this, what the important considerations are, and where it could all go wrong?"
Any manager that needs to look at logs like this for their employees is incompetent and dragging your company down. A good manager provides positive incentives for employees and creates loyalty both to himself and to the company by treating employees like people. The only reason to consider removing an employee is if they are not getting their job done. If this is the case, then they should be able to tell him why. If he does not trust them, he should find someone else regardless of what a log says.
Treating your employees as mercenaries will make them act that way. Why should they give 2 weeks notice if they're leaving? Why shouldn't they steal office supplies if they can get away with it. Why shouldn't they make a copy of your customer database or defect to the competition? If money is all you are offering, then you can always be outbid.
One thing you might want to consider and which might be able to pull you company out of its cultural death spin is moving drastically from secret monitoring to complete openness. Make an announcement to the whole company that internet monitoring is being applied and then open the system up to everyone. Managers will be able to see what sites their employees visit, but employees will be able to see what sites their bosses visit and when and for how long. We have such a system here, and every now and again we'll announce in a meeting the person who wasted the most time on Slashdot that month.
With such a move to openness i does not seem so much like an us versus them arrangement, but rather an even playing field for all. It works for us, but then we also have a very progressive culture of treating employees well and avoiding micro management. People take on responsibilities and the only problem is if they don't live up to them. No one cares if I post on Slashdot in the middle of the day, so long as I get my work done and it is of sufficient quality. It may be too late where you work, however. You might want to seriously consider looking for an employer that is smarter.
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> We have such a system here, and every now and again we'll announce in a meeting the person who wasted the most time on Slashdot that month.
I don't consider Slashdot a waste of time. It is three things: A source of information, a source of encouragement (see what other people in the same situation go through, and how they cope/resolve), and a way to feel part of a community of like-minded people.
All three of these benefits are generally lacking for geeks in the Fortune 50
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I don't consider Slashdot a waste of time.
I was partly being facetious. Slashdot is not entirely a waste of time and does keep employees informed about current events in the tech field. It has, in fact, provided useful information that lead to further research and press announcements from our company. It is not, however, the primary duty of most employees so we can laughingly point out who spent the most time reading Slashdot instead of coding.
I did not mean to imply there is no worth to reading Slashdo
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How do you tell the difference between reading slashdot and having slashdot open in a window while you are working on something else. time() spent on the webbrowser process?
Actually, we measure the number of transactions between Slashdot and the host. So if you automatically reload Slashdot all the time, you'd win. We do differentiate RSS though and discount it. Note, we did not waste any time setting this up, we happen to develop a tool for sale that has this as a small chunk of the functionality and it
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Depends, doesn't it? What if you're a cashier in a quickie-mart? A guy who shovels boxes into trucks at Fedex? An airline pilot, flying the plane?
Extreme examples (intended), but... clearly there are cases where the intar-tube has absolutely zero relevence, to the point of (possibly) being detrimental. Personal time during a break? That's a different story - and is more appropriate to the "coke machine" and "cable TV" examples. Off break & on duty? Not so
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A good manager provides positive incentives for employees and creates loyalty both to himself and to the company by treating employees like people.
I would also add to this that it is essential for a good manager to garner the respect of his employees and fosters respect among his employees.
I work for a huge, oppressive, impersonal, giant international corporation. Despite the Dilbert-esque corporate policies, I love working here. Why? I have huge amounts of professional respect for my dir
All the evidence of slacking that you need... (Score:4, Insightful)
Legal expectations of privacy.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank God my bosses believe me when I describe Slashdot as a tech reference site and I am in charge of any network monitoring we might do.
:)
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I can't believe this, Dave. Last week I nominated you for Employee of the Month and now I find this on the internets.
I'm sorry but I'm gonna have to let you go.
The Golden Rule (Score:4, Insightful)
The beat^Wcensoring will continue... (Score:3, Interesting)
If your employees/team are being productive, and your project is successful and you're meeting deadlines, I question why a manager really ought to care whether people are reading Slashdot or Google News or playing the occasional Flash game.
If work's getting done, don't micromanage -- let your people do their work; the damage you'll do by creating an adversarial work culture probably greatly outweighs the very small gain in efficiency you'll get by prohibiting web browsing (and for some people, proh
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I am fine with that but of course lawyers seem to be able to play all kinds of games with that if the person is a minority or a female etc...
From the hard working employee looking up it looks like a stupid and ridiculous decision. From the manager looking down it looks like a stupid and ridiculous process to avoid other stupide
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Ironic (Score:1)
Same here. (Score:1)
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No excuse (Score:2)
I think there is enough technical advice/insight on /. (if you've got a good BS filter) that it could be considered at least a grey area for a lot of folks in technical jobs. Many of the "Ask Slashdot" discussions provide the insight of experienced people.
Consider this discussion. If you were newly in a position like this, getting a feel for how other people have handled the situation would be useful.
Back on topic, I have always tried to resist efforts of mid-managers to rifle through the logs. It's ti
it's been said... (Score:3, Interesting)
At a previous job I had the task of the web filter logs, as well as access to all emails and user's files. Sure, I looked at them sometimes, but only if I needed to. And yes, at times lower lever managers - supervisors - would ask for information about their direct reports.
Even though no direct policy like this existed, I told them I will only give that information to HR. One time the CEO asked for something, and I would not even give it to him. I defered him to my boss, who, probably gave it to him, but I made it very clear:
"I've been given trust by the company to access this information. What if someone went to a website that divulged information about a medical condition that they were keeping secret? Granted, they would be wrong for doing it on company time, but I am NOT going to be the one to give up that information"
I think I also gained a little respect by saying that and instituting my policy. Of course, YMMV
Incompetent managers (Score:2)
If you give all your people the same amount of work to do, and one of them doesn't do it as well or as quickly as the rest, it doesn't matter why. He's a substandard employee, and needs to improve or leave.
By the same token, if you
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This can get funny... (Score:5, Funny)
Besides, I did all my non-work web browsing on my PDA using the wireless link from the company next door. Do you know how hard it was to type a Slashdot comment on a tiny virtual keyboard?
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Besides, I did all my non-work web browsing on my PDA using the wireless link from the company next door. Do you know how hard it was to type a Slashdot comment on a tiny virtual keyboard?
I think it depends on your model. Mine has a feature where it automatically generates a comment disagreeing with a specified comment. It works great for Slashdot, as the PDA's intelligence, however artificial, is on par with the average user here. I accidentally used the feature on one of my own comments once, and peopl
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Ultimately a Management decision (Score:3, Insightful)
Some companies make it very clear that people who work for them are subject to monitoring, etc., and can expect no privacy. Others will have the same general policy, but have other policies in place as to who can see the logs and under what circumstances. That's what you'll have to establish, and it's a decision that should be handled at a management level high enough to make it stick.
My answer, in the absense of an established policy would be "Have your boss talk to my boss, and they can hash it out with HR and Legal."
Give them an inch (Score:4, Informative)
Ask them about the costs. (Score:2)
The way that I would frame your response is to calculate how much these reports would cost in terms of:
We aren't authorized! (Score:3, Interesting)
This needs to be a company policy... (Score:2, Insightful)
I suspect that this is also further complicated by the fact that employment is regulated at the detail level on a state by state basis, and therefore the legal aspects of your situation will be influenced by local laws.
However, what I would do if this is the first time this has happened is to run t
Ergo2000 said it best... (Score:2)
Any management that thinks auditing is an effective way of encouraging good work ethics is insane and grossly inept and should be fired immediately. Any manager that sees low productivity or low morale and thinks the solution is to start snooping on employee activities should give up and become a basket weaver.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8124&cid=7 22020 [slashdot.org]
Witch hunt door opened... (Score:2)
Quid Pro Quo (Score:2)
Set policy. Then stick to it. (Score:1)
1. Set a distinct, written policy regarding what's allowable and what isn't. If users can casually browse during idle moment
Privacy doesn't count as your biggest problem... (Score:2)
Before worrying about privacy issues (you can make those go away with the simple wave of an AUP), you should perhaps wonder if the people in question work hourly or on salary.
You have a set of sites you allow. If you then scold people for going there, you need a reason to do so. "Wasting time" simply doesn't apply to salaried employees - As the flip-side to all that unpaid ov
I got in trouble (Score:5, Funny)
Management "Rights" (Score:2, Insightful)
I look for the obvious. (Score:2)
Company resources/policy == !privacy (Score:2)
Someone checking their e-mail over lunch is one thing, but someone spending half the day checki
Investigations here are done by a separate group (Score:2)
Problems with only logging the site (Score:2)
Written Policy (Score:2)
I've had to setup internet use policies (Score:2, Insightful)
Post them both. (Score:2)