Should overworked employees be allowed to surf the Web on the job?

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May 11, 2000
Web posted at: 8:57 a.m. EDT (1257 GMT)

by Julene Snyder

(IDG) -- With the jobless rate at a 30-year low and the Internet Economy chugging along, more people are working hard and long. And if routine 10-hour days mean they book vacation tickets and nervously check on their stock portfolios at work, who can blame them?

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Management at companies like Compaq, IBM and NCR, to name a few; these and other firms are clients of a host of Internet filtering companies like Cyber Patrol, Surfcontrol, Surfwatch and Websense, whose products block employee access to Web sites that their companies deem objectionable or distracting.

There is ample evidence that people conduct personal business while on the corporate clock. Witness March figures from the Nielsen NetRatings report, which shows that hits to sites like Nasdaq.com and SportsLine.com are up sharply during work hours from the previous month. Among the top 25 most-visited sites during work hours: Amazon.com, eBay, RealNetworks and Travelocity, sites unlikely to be work-related for most. Employment site Vault.com surveyed 1,200 employees and found that "37.1 percent of employees surf nonwork-related sites constantly during work hours."

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But if employees using company resources to conduct personal business is an epidemic, it appears to be a benign affliction in the eyes of management at some of the more innovative companies that have come to represent the Internet Economy. Established tech companies like Microsoft and Oracle, and many startups like MP3.com, don't monitor or limit employees' Web usage or e-mail.

"We recognize that a certain amount of personal tasks will get taken care of at work," says a Microsoft spokeswoman. "It's expected that people will use e-mail and the Internet for business purposes, but we realize that people have lives." (Those lives, however, need to preclude work-time forays to pornographic sites; policy at Microsoft, as at other companies, expressly forbids it.)

Others are less forgiving. James Underwood, information technology specialist at Canon, says his company signed up with Internet filtering company Websense two years ago to "take the job of policing off the shoulders of our IT department." Some employees were accessing inappropriate sites at work and management wanted it stopped. "Everyone's on salary," says Underwood. "Raises and bonuses are based on performance; if they feel like shopping for an hour, they're going to have to make it up somewhere else."

Not all companies with Web-filtering software completely limit employee access. Websense CEO John Carrington says 10 percent of his company's clients don't block employee access to Web sites; they subscribe to the service in order to scrutinize detailed reports of where employees are going. For example, if a company has high turnover and they find that a particular department's workers are spending a good deal of time shopping for a new job, that's cause for concern.

MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson says curbing his employees' Web use is unthinkable. "If artificial barriers are necessary to keep employees dedicated to company goals, then that's an indicator of weak management."

Going beyond Robertson's laissez-faire attitude, some firms actually hire companies like Perksatwork.com, which encourages unfettered Web use by employees. Perksatwork, whose clients include Oracle, Starbucks and Sun Microsystems, charges companies a fee to customize employee portals that offer workers discounts for goods and services, as well as forums to discuss issues like parenting and tools to take out a loan or buy a car.

Database giant Oracle, which signed up with Perksatwork a few months ago, doesn't filter Web sites or monitor employee e-mail. Sally Huchingson, Oracle's corporate public relations spokeswoman, says the company isn't concerned that workers do personal tasks at work. "We have no concerns about our employees being remiss in their jobs," she says, adding that certain behavioral guidelines must be followed. "If we deem any situation inappropriate, Oracle will take disciplinary action."

At least some in the tech trenches see the main problem with cyberslacking to be the amount of bandwidth and resources it takes up. A Texas-based system administrator, who asked to remain nameless, is so disgusted that he has to tidy up after inconsiderate employees that he's quitting his job at a technology company.

"Cleaning up after entertainment uses of the network occupies a third of my time," he said wearily. "MP3s, videos, Shockwave games ö some of these things dump a couple of megs of files on the hard drive every time you play, and they don't go away."

On the other hand, one Southern California technical consultant believes Web filtering is a losing proposition. "Companies probably lose more money trying to control their employees with an iron fist than they do in lost productivity by giving them free access," he says.

In his years of hopping from firm to firm, the consultant has seen a sort of in-house digital divide develop between who does and doesn't get to use their computers for nonwork-related activities. Upper management, he says, is most often guilty of this double standard. "They always want full access to the Net, and have the authority to demand it. By far, upper management is the worse offender for slacking," the consultant says.

At a recent Websense-sponsored productivity summit, Louis Maltby, president of the National Work Rights Institute and former director of the ACLU's National Taskforce on Civil Liberties in the Workplace, asserted that privacy issues should be of paramount concern to both employees and businesses.

"Do you want your boss to know that you've got a drinking problem?" Maltby asked. "Or that you're a victim of domestic violence? Or that your finances are in tatters and you're about to go bankrupt and lose your house? I don't think so."

It's also not necessarily to the benefit of employers to know so much about their employees' business. "Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, once a person has been hired, it is illegal to gather medical information without a compelling reason," says Maltby. "An employer might end up violating the law because they're monitoring the Web sites employees are visiting."

In the end, corporations see employees either as potentially wayward children who need constant watching or assume they're grown-up enough to handle the temptations of slacking off at work. And many tech employees are in the position to ask themselves what kind of company they want to work for. Perksatwork President and CEO Jim Greene says, "For an employer to aggressively monitor the amount of surfing and e-mail traffic among employees would have the effect of ultimately losing the war for talent."

Case in point: Veteran Web programmer Dan Balis of New York says he'd never work for a company that curbs his Internet usage. "Tech workers are accustomed to dictating the character of their environment. Corporations cut themselves off from a vast pool of talent by limiting their usage. It's a bit Orwellian."

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