Let’s do the time warp again

Businesses try to restrict Internet access for employees, employees diligently try to find ways around these restrictions. What year is it again?

It’s a common complaint from young people who join the work force with the expectation that their bosses will embrace technology as much as they do. Then some discover that sites they’re supposed to be researching for work are blocked. Or they can’t take a little downtime to read a news story online or check their personal e-mail or social networking accounts. In some cases, they end up using their own Internet-enabled smart phones to get to blocked sites, either for work or fun.

So some are wondering: Could companies take a different approach, without compromising security or workplace efficiency, that allows at least some of the online access that younger employees particularly crave?

“It’s no different than spending too much time around the water cooler or making too many personal phone calls. Do you take those away? No,” says Gary Rudman, president of GTR Consulting, a market research firm that tracks the habits of young people. “These two worlds will continue to collide until there’s a mutual understanding that performance, not Internet usage, is what really matters.”

[…]

There is, of course, another side of the story — from employers who worry about everything from wasted time on the Internet to confidentiality breaches and liability for what their employees do online. Such concerns have to be taken especially seriously in such highly regulated fields as finance and health care, says Nancy Flynn, a corporate consultant who heads the Ohio-based ePolicy Institute.

From a survey Flynn did this year with the American Management Association, she believes nearly half of U.S. employers have a policy banning visits to personal social networking or video sharing sites during work hours. Many also ban personal text messaging during working days.

Flynn notes that the rising popularity of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other devices with Web access and messaging have made it much trickier to enforce what’s being done on work time, particularly on an employee’s personal phone. Or often the staff uses unapproved software applications to bypass the blocks.

As a result, more employers are experimenting with opening access.

Didn’t we have this debate, like, last decade? I realize that Internet usage is more pervasive now, but the basic threats – productivity losses, exposure to malware, corporate security breeches, bandwidth overload – are the same, and people are now that much more used to having the Internet at their disposal. I don’t see how trying to clamp down now is going to be any more successful than it was ten years ago when the debate was over employees’ usage of email, though perhaps the current dismal environment for job-seekers will put a temporary lid on the complaints about it.

Of course, if employers really want to kill of websurfing at work, I have a simple solution for them, which I can guarantee will work: Make IE6 your standard platform, and disallow any updates to the browser or installations of new browsers. That’ll keep ’em out of Facebook and on their jobs.

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