Business Social Networking for New Zealand Businesses
How Concerned are Companies with Regard to Internet Surfing by Staff?
Each company has a different policy regarding internet use. Some will lock down access to only a few sites, while others may have an open access policy. Others may deploy access rules on their firewall or use a hardware appliance to block certain categories from being accessed.
Internet abuse is common, and habits can be hard to break. Even a staff member spending 45 minutes to an hour per day can build up to alot of lost revenue and productivity for a company.
Businesses now have to contend with staff spending time on the internet related to social networking, chat, playing games, gambling, blogging, Twitter, TradeMe to name a few. Then there are the minority looking at pornographic material and worse.
On the horizon is Google Wave (wave.google.com/ ) which brings together email / social networking / chat all into one. This is going to be popular, and potentially a time waster.
Internet auditing is essential for any business. Whether you do a complete audit of all your machines, a random sweep of several machines, or targeted auditing, it will identify the type of internet activity occurring. This is a cost effective service that should go hand in hand with your Acceptable Use policies. It will take away the responsibility of managing internet monitoring hardware or software in-house, and allow you to manage internet activity via regular auditing and internal policies.
Internet abuse is common, and habits can be hard to break. Even a staff member spending 45 minutes to an hour per day can build up to alot of lost revenue and productivity for a company.
Businesses now have to contend with staff spending time on the internet related to social networking, chat, playing games, gambling, blogging, Twitter, TradeMe to name a few. Then there are the minority looking at pornographic material and worse.
On the horizon is Google Wave (wave.google.com/ ) which brings together email / social networking / chat all into one. This is going to be popular, and potentially a time waster.
Internet auditing is essential for any business. Whether you do a complete audit of all your machines, a random sweep of several machines, or targeted auditing, it will identify the type of internet activity occurring. This is a cost effective service that should go hand in hand with your Acceptable Use policies. It will take away the responsibility of managing internet monitoring hardware or software in-house, and allow you to manage internet activity via regular auditing and internal policies.
Add a Comment
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Comment by Sheldon Nesdale on October 29, 2009 at 7:13pm
- Someone will fill it to the top with lollies?
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Comment by Dean Stewart on October 29, 2009 at 3:39pm - Rules will always be broken, boundaries always pushed, and if you leave the lid off the lolly jar in the shop, you know what's going to happen..
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Comment by Debra E Clark on October 29, 2009 at 2:31pm -
Life would be so simple if we simply said "please do not play facebook games on work time" and the manager walks away knowing the staff member has listened. [cough cough]
Life would be even simpler if employees looked at the job at hand, the role they have been employed for, the future of the business they work for .............. and just worked or used their initiative for the good of the company when there is down time! Oh my gosh, that would be a fine thing too... since when has playing games, surfing personal social networks been an employees task (non work related I'm talking about)...
But lets face it, there are always bad apples that spoil it for good apples.
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Comment by Dean Stewart on October 29, 2009 at 10:10am
- I prefer the open approach as well. Backing it up with occassional internet auditing will give business owners some piece of mind as to what is really occuring.
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So draconian! I have worked at several places with such filters at the router level, they even had messages like "that website is blocked, get back to work!". It felt like an invasion of privacy, it felt like I was being watched. And it turned out I needed access to YouTube and TradeMe for my job anyway, so the blocks were removed for me, so how did that make my workmates feel?
I just wanted a manager to come up to me and say "Please don't use TradeMe or YouTube or other social networking website during your work time". Thats it. Simple. (They might have to remind me once or twice a year).
Acceptable use policies are a waste of paper. They get lost in the employment agreement and never get seen again (or quickly forgotten about). Infact, the way they are presented - "in the fine print", it's almost like they are ashamed of them themselves! Managers just need to talk about it openly.
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Comment by Dean Stewart on October 29, 2009 at 8:30am
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Hi Sheldon,
yes, having 'acceptable use' policies and asking staff not to visit certain sites is one approach, but it often does not work. Internet auditing will expose the amount of non work related use that goes unnoticed. Its a differnet approach, but once exposed, it can often alter behaviours.
Small businesses can take a different approach by implementing web filtering on their external routers. It may not be that well known, but there are reputable products out there for free. One such product is OpenDNS and can be found at www.opendns.com
Users setup an account, then click the router they have. Each router has its own documentation for setup. Once setup, all internet traffic goes through their site, and filtered based on the criteria you have set. Its a great product.
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- Yeah, tricky one. One approach is to talk to your staff and ask them to refrain. Hopefully they will feel guilty enough to cut back at least.
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