VITMAN Blog

Do your staff use or abuse the internet? And how would you know?

The first thing to say is that you should have a formal internet use policy and an email use policy in place within your business. This should make it clear what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.

Estimates suggest that about 40% of browsing at work is non-work related (and this is a conservative estimate) which means that there is an awful lot of lost productivity out there.

For example one employee on minimum wage was to spending only 2 hours a week cyber-skiving would cost your company over £560 a year in wage costs alone, then multiply this figure by the number of employees and take into account that they are likely to be paid much more than the minimum wage and it adds up to a huge problem. And that’s assuming that they only cyber-skive for 2 hours a week! And with the football world cup coming up we would expect this to rise even more over those few weeks.

The other problem that can occur is that users can access inappropriate material, pornography, illegal file downloads, peer to peer file sharing etc. potentially leaving you as an employer in a difficult position legally. OK most employees are are sensible but hey it does happen!

There is also a security issue, as well as users downloading ”dodgy material” they can also inadvertently be downloading hidden viruses and malware so its best to prevent it.

It is possible to put software packages in place that control what can be accessed by employees on the internet, with most you can tailor the settings so that they suit your business needs, for example you could set hard rules that permanently ban porn sites whilst having a more flexible rule to block shopping or news sites during working hours but allow access over the lunch hour. You might also have different rules for different departments or individuals.

Most packages generally also have the facility to generate reports on how the internet is being used in your business allowing you to fine tune the rules you choose to put in place as time goes on.

Have a look here for information about this subject.

Tags: filtering internet, internet abuse, internet at work, internet use, internet use reporting, web monitoring, web use

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.