Employee Monitoring

[Richard1]

Companies it seem are cracking down more and more on employees using the internet, employee theft or making personal calls, etc. My last job they were pretty vigilant about phone calls but not so muh on Internet usage. Have you had any experience with your company and employee monitoring, or are you the person who controls the monitoring? Would love to hear from you.

[Mayet]

As an employer I was always generous with those aspects for my employees. Although I found it to be abused sometimes which was sad. I had one employee who ended up loading torrents onto a workstation and using my internet to download lots of illegal stuff. I hit the roof when I found out and must have lectured for an hour about respect, crossing lines and how much trouble we as a company can get into.

A secretary/receptionist I had installed msn on her system and all she did all day was chat to her boyfriend, instead of doing paperwork that I required. She was eventually dismissed for lying on her job sheets over her training hours.

Since then I have kept a tighter rein on what they do although Im pretty easy going. I like happy employees who are happy to come to work and I find some lurks and perks and bonuses are good to keep the happy ambience.


Of an afternoon when most jobs were out for day and no more service calls we would all have a head to head gaming session or if I was busy some would go online and game for a bit.

I have always given free email access and free phone access and the only one that abused that once again was the secretary, who didn't last long anway. I think the key is flexibility but respect and if you dont get the respect then that employee is the wrong one anyways.

Happy employees are productive employees.

[rgharper]

We monitor websites visited by employees but the logfiles are not routinely read or reviewed except by request.

An employee's supervisor or manager can go to the Human Resources department and request a review if they suspect an employee is visiting sites they should not. The review is then carried out by HR with the IT staff assisting. The HR staff then reports back to the manager/supervisor only the data that is necessary to either support or disprove the claim - either confirmation that the employee has visited improper sites or that there is no evidence of such habits.

No one other than the IT and HR reviewers ever see the raw logfiles, and we don't conduct reviews or audits of the logfiles except to extract records for a specific employee for a review.

[houseisland]

At one of my previous employers, there was an HR driven initiative to crack down on employee misuse of the Internet.

We used this product: http://www.burstek.com/products/btwebfilter.htm

The problem was that the software revealed that there really wasn't a problem and all the draconian blocking of web sites only increased employee cynicism and further damaged general morale.

I am not slagging the Burstek product here. It does what it says it will. It is not particularly expensive. And Burstek provides pretty good tech support. However, I am slagging the HR initiative. It was pointless busy work. And it increased the IT Dept work load because the stock filters blocked a lot of legitimate websites and thus exemptions had to made on a fairly constant basis.

We also had system that plugged into the PBX to monitor phone use. Ironically, it was never turned on at anytime while I was there.

I am generally opposed to employee surveillance. It is insulting and disrespectful. There is, however, a time and place for it as there is for police surveillance -- but it does in both cases need probable cause for its initiation.

There is also a need to block external web mail for security reasons. Personal web mail is a chink in the armor of many an organisation.

[Ferrit]

I havent had any experience other then having to clean up messes in offices
it is a problem thats for sure and monitoring is needed
BUT
BUT
BUT
Where does it stop?
Do we go from stopping site access to key logging?
Because apparently thats a pretty easy jump for some companies.
I work for myself and as such i prolly dont really have an opinion.
But I think that education at the onset of employment about problems and consequences might be an answer.
If the employee moral is so low that they dont care, then all the monitoring in hell wont help is what I guess am saying.
You either have their respect and can depend on it or you dont and your playing
Clean up the mess.

[BOB IROC]

We have a huge problem with Employees abusing the priviledges of the phone and internet. Using websense for web filtering and monitoring we find more than 30% of our internet traffic from staff members are of the personal nature. Shopping sites, travel sites, and gaming sites (casino and gambling are the top). The phone is another story. I have been asked in the past to run phone reports on the night maintenance staff as well as members of our secretarial. One report I ran back in december of '05 on an employee showed that she spent an average of 6 hours a week on the phone with her husband and/or daughter. Thats almost a whole day of the week lost. Everyone is entitled to make a personal call here and there, but sometimes it gets outta hand. We are very strict when it comes to filtering our students, but when it comes to staff we grant them access to almost everything unless it is pornagraphic or illegal in nature. I would like to tighten it up and have tried, but as soon as I do the complaints roll in and management caves.

And don't even get me started on email. Most of our users think that their work email can be used for everything. I am constantly getting calls and requests to unblock filtered emails to find that over 80% of the time it is some stupid joke or a electronic receipt for something they bought online for personal use. Most of the time I refuse and remind them that they need to use a personal email account for those types of emails. They really have no excuse because yahoo, hotmail, and gmail to name a few are free and we allow our staff to check their personal email at work. The latest one I got was somebody did their taxes here online and had the information sent here. She asked me to unblock the response mails and I said no. She told her boss that she did her taxes here because she had not computer/internet at home and therefore no email. To my surprise her boss said that she was wrong and if she did not have a computer/internet at home she should do her taxes the old fashion way. She got written up for violating the usage policy and for doing her taxes on company time.

[MobilePCPhysician]

Myself and my company provide IT services to many busineses. Right now, we provide service to 12 businesses that pay us to monitor email, internet useage.

The companies provide documentation to all employees advising them of the policy. There are specific do's and don'ts. The penalties are clearly spelled out.

In the past 2 years, 5 employees have been let go because of abuse of the policy. Now, most companies followed the oral warning, written warning, then termination protocol. This means that the employee was informed of the infraction, was given 7 days to correct the behavior. Then the employee was monitored for compliance. If you screwed up after the second warning, you must really be dense.

Guess what? A company let someone go who violated the policy three times, followed all the protocols, and the woman is suing the company, and me and my company, claiming a whole load of crap. My insurance company is providing a "complimentary" defense, but I will have to hire separate counsel to get this dismissed, hopefully. There is a chance she could win a judgement that exceeds the companies and my companies' insurance maximums. (Boy it's great to live in the USA.) This could take years, potentially, to work out.

Did I just raise the price to the other clients? You bet I did. I explained why to all of them. It was a 50% increase. No one blinked......

I never thought owning an It business that I would have to have the lawyer's phone number on speed dial..

[Matridom]

I used to work (changing jobs this weekend) in a call center of about 1000 employees. Personal calls never happen while on the clock. Every employee knows that any time they use the phone at their desk, there is a good chance it will be recorded (about 5% of the time actualy). If you want to make a personal call, take a break and use a free phone in the lunch room, using a cell phone at your desk get's you walked out of the place for the day and in some cases fired (I've been responsible for just such a situation).

Internet usage.. Ah yes, this is the big one, my company uses a program called surfpatrol (i think). I know that in some situations, logs of surfing can be requested, but only on complaint. The only time i ever heard of this being done was one guy who got fired for looking at porn of himself.

The company blocks most game sites and porn sites. They also attempt to block all chat applications (they are having a hard time with gmails chat) and open proxies. Activities like remote desktop/VNC/SSH/Telnet are also all blocked.

[3fingersalute]

We use SurfPatrol to block access to sites such as porn, violent & offensive, etc. since we are an educational facility. SurfPatrol also does logging, but we never usually look at individual logs unless it is requested, but we do however look at weekly reports to see who's attempting to access blocked sites.

Funny story, a new employee sent an email the other day apologizing because she was trying to access Dick's Sporting Goods website, which is www.dickssportinggoods.com, but she tried it without the sportinggoods part, so she hit our "Access Denied" page through surf patrol, and was quite embarassed

[amyb]

In the past I was the one that had to enforce/monitor the Internet usage(at my previous jobs). If people were accessing porn sites I would say something. One time I found a nude picture of a woman on a network printer (the guy thought he printed it to a printer that wasn't wired to the network in his office--I got to it before he got to the printer). I took that picture and went to my boss and kiddingly asked him if he printed that out (the look on his face was priceless). What a jerk that guy was (not my boss), he was finally fired. Now, at my present job (at a church)..I don't have to be so diligent.

[Radical Dreamer]

We use SurfPatrol to block access to sites such as porn, violent & offensive, etc. since we are an educational facility. SurfPatrol also does logging, but we never usually look at individual logs unless it is requested, but we do however look at weekly reports to see who's attempting to access blocked sites.

Funny story, a new employee sent an email the other day apologizing because she was trying to access Dick's Sporting Goods website, which is www.dickssportinggoods.com, but she tried it without the sportinggoods part, so she hit our "Access Denied" page through surf patrol, and was quite embarassed

Had this happen to a girl at the call center I used to work for, we didnt use any web filtering tho.

[slgrieb]

My experience has been that try to use criteria like "inappropriate internet usage", "excessive phone time", and such as grounds for termination can be legally shaky unless the organization can prove that the employee in question is failing to meet specific performance standards. Since lots of organizations lack formal work/time standards, management may find they have opened a can of worms and (as in MobilPC's post) now have expensive legal problems to deal with.

In the case of employees like LadyX who spent an average of six hours a week on the phone with her husband and children, imagine how embarrassing it would be for management to find out once they got into court, that her productivity was 10% higher than average. If her supervisor had a problem with her job performance, any disciplinary action should have been based strictly on her performance. Period. How about if it turned out that one of LadyX's children had a serious medical condition she was reluctant to admit?

This isn't just a wild supposition either. My wife works in public health, and many of her Hispanic clients will try very hard to cover up any health problems with their children because their culture tends to assume the mother is always at fault in such cases. For example, she recently saw a client with a child suffering from Bell's Palsy, which causes some degree of facial paralysis. This is not rare in children, and is temporary. (My older daughter had it at about 2 years of age). The woman was very carefull to always present her child's OK side during all tests, innoculations, etc. After a tactful story about our daughter's experiece, the mom admitted that she had felt responsible for her child's condition and had hidden it from her family, too.

OK, long digression, but I hope everyone gets my point: The only reasonable grounds for disciplinary action in business must be based on performance related standards which are measureable and uniform. OK, if Frank shows up for work one day with rabies, runs amok and bites some co-workers, you can terminate him, but you get the point.

Trying to track employee emails, net usage, etc. is expensive and counter-productive, and just flat misses the measurements of performance that really matter.

[BOB IROC]

slgrieb,

You make some valid points, but like most places I do not run a report unless asked to by a manager and usually it is because of something like job performance. In the case of the lady I mentioned that spends 6 hrs a week on personal phone calls her performance is about 30% - 40% of average. She constantly complains that she doesn't have enough time to complete her tasks and that is why I was asked to run a report on her phone usage as well as her internet usage. I can't see a place of employment not being understanding if circumstances that you described are at hand, but some people just are plain lazy.

[slgrieb]

I agree 100% with you, Bob. Some employees fail to understand the GottaGit concept: You gotta git it or you gotta git! All I'm trying to say, is that managers need to focus on performance issues (like LadyX's 30% shortfall, but keep family issues in mind) and not be distracted by issues like phone time, potty breaks, etc. If your organization has job standards in place, they should use them as performance criteria, and not waste your time with phone logs, etc. Not cost effective or effective in court.

If LadyX's co-workers can meet standards with the same work conditions (family issues apart), management should temporarily assigne a supervisor to monitor her work or perfrom it while she watches. If you can demonstrate that LadyX'x workload can be performed in the standard time by supervisory personnel you can certainly sack her! The bottom line is again: All Disciplinary Action Must Be Performance Based!

[BOB IROC]

Well being in education we keep detailed records for other reasons besides employee misuse and performance. I very rarely look at the phone logs, but the web usage is easy to monitor as it gives nice graphs and pie charts stating usage. It divides by group or you can get an individuals usage with a click of a button. I guess it is frustrating when I spend my day bustin my *** and I see others just skating along and doin everything half assed.