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Getting a Handle on Employee Internet Usage
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According to a recent study, employee Internet usage is costing American companies over $85 billion dollars a year in lost productivity and a startling 80 percent of all US companies have reported employee Internet abuse at work. To say that the problem of employee Internet abuse has become epidemic would be an understatement. No employer expects their workforce to have their shoulder to the grindstone every second of every minute during the work day, but when hours upon hours are being wasted, an employer needs to step in and solve the problem.
Getting a handle on employee Internet usage can be done in two steps. First, you need to come up with a comprehensive usage policy that clearly states what your workforce is allowed to do and what they aren’t and what the penalties will be if they are caught. This usage policy works hand in hand with a computer monitoring software suite that you will have installed on your network. This program will give you or a supervisor a complete list of all websites visited on each one of your work stations every day. This kind of software is absolutely vital in fighting excessive web browsing at work, as well as helping to keep your network free of viruses and other malicious software bugs. Although laws vary by state, in most cases, you are legally obligated to tell your staff that you are monitoring their online usage, which is why drafting a usage policy is so important.
If you aren’t completely sold as to why you and your company must have an Internet usage policy and comprehensive monitoring software, you may want to consider exactly the kind of content your workforce may be accessing on company time. This epidemic might not be so bad if people were simply checking news headlines, sports scores and gardening tips, but the reality is a bit more sinister. Studies have shown that employees engage in hacking activities simply out of boredom or because they aren’t happy with their current employer. Instant messaging has also become a huge problem, with employees spending hours chatting with their family and friends when they should be working. The right monitoring software can tell if you any such programs are downloaded and installed on any of your computers.
There is also overwhelming evidence that people install peer-2-peer file sharing programs on their work computers so that they can download everything from music to television shows to movies when they should be working. Worst of all, the virus infection rate on these programs is extremely high, and it wouldn’t just be that one computer that would be affected with a virus, it would be every computer in your network.
Surprisingly, a huge percentage of work computers contain pornography that is downloaded during work hours. Employee monitoring software can alert you when someone is accessing a forbidden site that may contain adult images. Finally, a number of people will listen or watch streaming media at work, which can not only eat up your bandwidth, it can also kill productivity, as well.
The only way you can fight back against internet abuse is with a comprehensive Internet usage policy and the right software to monitor the goings-on during your work day. You simply have too much to lose by not taking action.
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