New research from Robert Half Technology indicates that over half of chief information officers (CIOs) do not allow employees to visit social networking sites for any reason while they’re at work. This information comes from a survey of 1,400 CIOs from companies around the US with 100 or more employees.

Is this strictness justified? Amber Naslund makes some good points in a WebProNews interview. Among other things she says that instead of employers telling their staff how they should not be using social media, they should try balancing that by giving them some ways that they should use it.

What I say – People are not robots, employers need to find a middle-way

In some parts of the world, bandwidth is charged at exorbitant rates, so some sort of safeguard and watchfulness are required from a pure cost standpoint.

I feel it is unreasonable, however, to expect employees to work without some sort of social interaction, especially in a client-facing role. Humans are social creatures and being social stimulates all sorts of wonderful brain activity; production CAN be increased as long as employees understand what REASONABLE use of the Internet entails.

“Phone bills are itemized, and web browsing should be too!”

More often than not, this distinction is not explained or understood. We all have telephones on our desk these days, but it would be unthinkable for us as employees to spend all day chatting to our wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends. Phone bills are itemized, and web browsing should be too.

While this may come across as a plug for our products, it is far more than that. I truly believe that blocking defeats the purpose and the spirit of the Internet in general. I’ve dealt with companies that lock down everything except for 50 sites. I’ve also dealt with companies that perform no monitoring, reporting, or any such user governance. Both forms of policies (if you can call the latter example a policy) are extreme and do no good in the long term.

At WebSpy we have found the majority consensus of our customer base to be alike: they return to us and tell us that their bandwidth usage, and their employee browsing habits have all changed for the better when their employees have it explained to them that before work, after work and during lunch, no one really cares what you do or where you go – within reason (and seriously, browsing for porn at work is unbelievably stupid) – and that everything you say and do online bears some reflection back to your employer.

Education always triumphs over draconian measures!

Rather than sneer at your user base with some ideological feeling of moral superiority, educate and explain to them what the consequences of their browsing habits are. Ultimately, they will still appreciate their pay cheque arriving and will avoid the chance of jeopardizing such things. Inserting Internet usage policies into contracts protects the employer and informs the employee exactly where he stands.

Would love to hear YOUR thoughts on this subject!

Something of great importance is taking the users of the network you intend to monitor into consideration. Overly intrusive practices can easily create the negative perception that Big Brother is watching and make employees feel frustrated and uncomfortable. Effective Internet monitoring requires a two-pronged approach; intuitive monitoring software AND workforce education / consideration.

This time around I would like to expand on the best ways of monitoring your organizational Internet usage whilst maintaining a harmonious working environment between employers and employees.

1. Allow for a certain amount of personal / recreational usage

Prohibiting all personal use is usually both impractical and virtually impossible to enforce in most work environments. Allowing a certain amount of (monitored) online recreation can enhance many workplaces and ultimately make employees more productive. Recent research by Dr Brent Coker at the University of Melbourne shows that people who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.

2. Allow for a certain amount unmonitored usage

Employee privacy is a recurring concern when monitoring Internet usage at work. Employees are working longer hours than they ever before and might need to be able to deal with urgent personal matters online, during work time. By specifying and ensuring, that there will be no monitoring during lunch hours (for example), your employees can trust that their privacy is important to you, and you know it won’t affect their productivity.

3. Establish Acceptable Internet Usage Policies

Establish policies around Internet usage and:

• Explain the business-related reasons behind monitoring
• Clearly state what is considered productive and unproductive activity
• If you allow a certain amount of personal use, and / or unmonitored use during certain hours of the day, ensure you outline the exact specifications of these privileges
• Clearly state what is absolutely prohibited, for example, sending or accessing discriminatory, harassing, defamatory, or pornographic material, downloading or distributing copyrighted material without permission etc
• Include consequences for policy violations

4. Use an honest and open monitoring approach

The effectiveness of Internet monitoring directly relates to employees’ awareness of the content of the policy and corresponding breach consequences. Once your crystal clear policies have been developed, ensure you actively distribute, publish and communicate them so employees understand exactly what is expected of them and the conditions of their working environment.

5. Allow employees to view their own Internet usage

This is one of the best recommendations we can give you. More often than not, employees tend to underestimate the time they spend browsing non-work related sites. Allowing employees to view, for example, their productive and non-productive activity can help foster and drive responsible Internet usage behaviour. Employees who understand the organizational costs of their personal unproductive activities are more likely to accept your monitoring activities and modify their own behaviour accordingly.

6. Monitor the whole organization (even managers)

If you ensure everyone knows the whole organization is being monitored, as opposed to individual users or departments, you will decrease the likelihood employees feeling singled out or treated unfairly. Employees feel affirmed if procedures are adopted to treat them with respect and dignity and the likelihood of Internet monitoring acceptance and effectiveness is increased.

7. Help employees sticking to the rules

If you have set a limit of, for example, no more than 10 hours of recreational surfing per month, then ensure you alert employees when they are approaching that limit. Again, this will give the employees another opportunity to modify their own behaviour before they actually violate your Acceptable Internet Usage Policy.

8. Distribute reports – distribute responsibility

Frequently IT managers and administrators are given the ultimate responsibility of managing, enforcing and communicating acceptable Internet usage for an entire organization. Take some of the pressure off the IT department and distribute organizational Internet activity reports to responsible managers or department heads. This will enable them to see how Internet usage affects the security and performance of their own department and distributes the responsibility of enforcing acceptable usage with the managers themselves.

9. Protect employee privacy

If distributing Internet usage reports across your organization it is important to protect employees’ personal data. Make sure you use monitoring software designed to protect privacy rights by only allowing authorized users to see the employee’s identity. For instance, Network Administrators may need to investigate all traffic going to a particular site but should not need to know the user names – in this case user names should be anonymous for them but available for HR.

10. Automation

Find a monitoring solution that easily lets you customize and automate the majority of these guidelines for you. Right here might be a good place to start looking…

What do you think of these tips? Please feel free to comment below and share Internet monitoring tips that have assisted you in creating a productive and balanced working environment.

In all fairness these are all critical aspects worth attention but what about the rest? What about the legitimate activity on your network? What can you benefit from monitoring and reporting on legitimate, or good, internet activity?

As always when writing a blog I Google the topic to get some extra material, see what has previously been written and ensure I’m not just repeating what someone else is already saying. After all I want to give the readers WebSpy’s unique view on matters. For this blog I don’t have to worry about any repetitiveness. Ten minutes fierce Google investigation did not produce a single page on how or why good web activity should be monitored. I even tried Bing with the same unsatisfying outcome.

So here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth, 3 reasons to monitor and report on good web activity:

1. Investigate Software as a Service (SaaS) Usage

Reliance on SaaS is increasing rapidly. You’re hopefully saving money thanks to its on demand license abilities, but could you save even more? Let’s say you are paying a monthly fee based on a 500 user license. You start monitor the traffic to this specific SaaS and notice that during the last 3 month only 300 employees are actively using it. With this new information at hand you immediately change your license subscription, pay less every month and everyone wins. Well, maybe not the SaaS provider.

2. Reward and Encourage Change in Behaviour

You are sick and tired of paying expensive phone bills and want your employees to start relying on using Skype as much as they possibly can. Now, it comes as no surprise that changing ones behaviour, at work or in private, doesn’t just happen overnight. It often requires a bit of time, control and motivation. You therefore start monitoring organizational use of Skype and reward those employees who start using it extensively and work on further encouraging the ones who don’t.

3. Encourage Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB)

Those of you keeping up with latest Internet productivity research would be well aware of the University of Melbourne’s latest study. Dr Brent Coker found that WILB actually increases employee concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce. Coker states that, “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.” He continues to explain that people need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration and short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself. This leads to a higher total net concentration for a days’ work, and as a result, increased productivity.

In this day and age, when employees are working harder and longer hours, it is important that employers are making sure their workforce is allowed, and make use of, well deserved breaks. Especially if it makes employees more satisfied and productive in the long run.

Simply state the amount of WILB you think is acceptable, monitor organizational WILB activity and encourage employees who do not take a WILB break every now and then to do so.

I’ve picked some specific reasons and example to illustrate the benefits but there are obviously many more. Perhaps I’ll continue to add to these reasons or perhaps you can comment with your own examples? If you have experienced benefits from monitoring legitimate web activity then please share it with us! Either comment below or email me directly at asa@webspy.com.

Please Note: Existing and prospective WebSpy clients are invited to participate in a follow-up WILB study carried out by Dr Brent Coker, from the University of Melbourne, himself. We strongly encourage our clients to get involved in this unique opportunity to get a concrete insight into how WILB affects their organization’s operations specifically and proactively take measures to create a more harmonious and productive working environment. In a sense Dr Coker’s expertise and findings can be considered a free consultancy to ensure organizational Internet investment is used to its full potential.

Dr Brent Coker is seeking organizations who would be interested in participating in a study to examine how WILB affects their employees’ productivity. Initial evidence from Dr Coker’s research suggests WILB in certain circumstances can result in improved productivity.

Participating in this research will offer organizations a chance to understand the extent to which their employee productivity is being affected by WILB. The degree to which organizations participates is optional, though the research may include analysis of data before and after internet access was controlled, or employee/supervisor interviews/surveys and analysis of employee performance data after internet access was monitored (e.g., using WebSpy).

This research is to be completely anonymous; data will be de-identified before analysis, and is subject to the privacy conditions provisioned in the University of Melbourne research statute. University of Melbourne ethics approval (#0828412.1) has been granted for this research.

We strongly encourage our clients to get involved in this unique opportunity to get a concrete insight into how WILB affects their organization’s operations specifically and:

• Get a better understanding of your employee’s loyalty and motivation to excel in the workplace.
• Proactively take measures to create a more harmonious and productive working environment.
• Use Dr Coker’s expertise and findings to ensure your Internet investment is used to its full potential.

To find out more information or to register your interests to participate in the study please contact:

Dr Brent Coker
Department of Management and Marketing
Level 9, 198 Berkeley Street
The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia
Tel:  +61-3-8344-1933�
Fax: +61-3-9349-4293
Email: bcoker@unimelb.edu.au

Read “Freedom to Surf” media release from the University of Melbourne
Read WebSpy’s media release discussing findings from previous study

READ RELATED ARTICLES:
CNET News: Study: ‘Leisure browsing’ increases productivity
People at Work and Play: WILB is Good for Your Employees
WA Today: Surfing the Net at Work can Boost Productivity
Fierce CIO Tech Watch: Surfing the Net Boosts Office Productivity
Security Vibes: Blocking Social Networks Decreases Productivity
ABC Net: Workplace Browsing Boosts Productivity: Study
Technology & Business: Facebook, YouTube at work make better employees: study