Submission + - Acceptable Use Policy - how verbose?
brendan.hill writes: As CIO of a large franchise group, I was recently approached to draft an "Acceptable Use Policy" for the ~40 staff at our head quarters.
Rather than adopt management speak or legalese, I decided to use everyday language, and keep it to half a page, and came up with the following:
This relates to your usage of computers, phones, internet, email, and other electronic equipment on the site.
1) Keep it work related. {Our Franchise Group} owns all this stuff, and we might monitor your usage.
2) Be polite and constructive. Your emails are stored permanently, and might be used in a court of law.
3) Don’t use them for anything illegal or offensive, including defamatory material, breaches of copyright, pornography, etc.
4) Don’t give any passwords to anyone else.
5) Don’t install anything on your computer without checking with the IT department first.
6) Please don’t send email attachments over 5MB. They probably won’t be received.
And that's it.
It quickly attracted the criticism of being somewhat unprofessional or incomplete, but I would argue that it is more accessible, more likely to be read and understood, and more likely to have an impact than the more traditional, abstract, management-ese policy documents you tend to see. The document is designed to actual influence people's behavior, instead of simply provide a declaration of what we can legally fire people for (which is probably covered by more generic legislation anyway).
Admittedly there is only a small audience and we have a rather informal culture anyway, but I think taking this approach has a lot of merit. Your thoughts?
Rather than adopt management speak or legalese, I decided to use everyday language, and keep it to half a page, and came up with the following:
This relates to your usage of computers, phones, internet, email, and other electronic equipment on the site.
1) Keep it work related. {Our Franchise Group} owns all this stuff, and we might monitor your usage.
2) Be polite and constructive. Your emails are stored permanently, and might be used in a court of law.
3) Don’t use them for anything illegal or offensive, including defamatory material, breaches of copyright, pornography, etc.
4) Don’t give any passwords to anyone else.
5) Don’t install anything on your computer without checking with the IT department first.
6) Please don’t send email attachments over 5MB. They probably won’t be received.
And that's it.
It quickly attracted the criticism of being somewhat unprofessional or incomplete, but I would argue that it is more accessible, more likely to be read and understood, and more likely to have an impact than the more traditional, abstract, management-ese policy documents you tend to see. The document is designed to actual influence people's behavior, instead of simply provide a declaration of what we can legally fire people for (which is probably covered by more generic legislation anyway).
Admittedly there is only a small audience and we have a rather informal culture anyway, but I think taking this approach has a lot of merit. Your thoughts?
