Figures about misuse of Internet at workplace

      Particular web use at work has turned into one of the offenders of corporate misfortune regarding the primary concern. After understanding this article you'll think about whether organization disappointments are an immediate aftereffect of worker web misuse instead of a drooping economy. It's a plague not to be disregarded as particular web use at work causes income misfortune at a disturbing rate. This accessibility shows a huge chance calculate for manager obligation and expenses managements many hours in profit every day. Following worker Internet utilization is restricted to lessen business risk. it is a fundamental malice.

    Around the numerous outcomes of Internet misuse is a misfortune of profit and scores of suit issues, for 

example sexual provocation, unfriendly work environment and separation. Following Employee Internet access is restricted that an association can point of confinement its obligation.

    Most managers 93 percent have guidelines for worker conduct, and 93 percent of the aforementioned convey that approach to all workers. On the other hand, just 87 percent of these strategies characterize "offense" and "horrible unfortunate behavior." Misconduct could be acting untrustworthily, savagery or criminal action, sending obscene material and breaking health and security runs the show. The right to gain entrance permitted to representatives additionally fluctuates. Just 54 percent of organizations permit staff access to the Internet what so ever and 49 percent access to Internet and message.

    There is a sum boycott on individual message at 10 percent of organizations, and on particular utilization of the Internet at 13 percent. Others are less sure, with 14 percent having no arrangement on message and 13 percent no standards on Internet utilization.

     Provided that your association is set to screen and cover representative Internet access, the workshop will give you an opportunity to show the workers what the Internet reports look like, and talk over the circumstances in which they will be utilized. Taking the secret out of what the association is arranging concerning Internet overseeing and blocking will lessen worker theory and set new desires all around the organizations.

Sources:

• www.irma-international.org/article/social-communication-mathematical-discourse-social/68386/
• http://www.workplaceinfo.com.au/human-resources-management/privacy-and-surveillance/internet-and-email-use
• http://www.getsmarter.co.za/blog-labour-law/125-internet-abuse-in-the-workplace

How to not get fired:

The internet provides a company many advantages to its company. From the unlimited information, communication and research that can be done, it also is a Segway to liability and loss of productivity. As mentioned in previous posts, most companies now make employees aware of an internet usage policy to minimize misuse that can lead to incidents such as firings. These policies are typically well defined and should be highlighted during the training process so that there are no questions! However; a policy alone cannot be enough unless there are people who are enforcing it. For people to take this seriously, they need to know that there is someone above them that is rigorously watching what they are doing on the dime of their employers. I believe the policy is being enforced when an employee is let go. This shows the seriousness of the employer to the employees.

So how do you not get fired when the number of dismissals due to internet misuse is increasing? “A survey of 304 US companies by the American Management Association and the ePolicy institute found that over 25% of employers have dismissed workers for inappropriate e-mail use, while 33% have dismissed employees for wasting time on the internet while on company time.”(mohabirandjaveria.blogspot.com) 70% of the employers make these disclosures in the employee’s handbook yet employees seldom read the full handbook. These statistics are an initial warning for employees who misuse the internet in their workplace. There are numerous more statistics of why employees use their work computer and internet for personal use. But the main way to resist getting fired is to just not do it. Employees are learning that employers are more serious now than before and should tread lightly when it comes to their job!

Barak, S. (2008) Getting Fired for Using the Internet Becomes Commonplace. The Inquirer. Retrieved from http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1033919/getting-fired-internet-commonplace

Punishing Employees

Does Punishing Employees for Internet Misuse Work?

I found this research paper on the UNCC library article search. It discusses the effectiveness of punishment of employees who misuse the internet at work. What the research found was that the employees were more concerned with the severity of the punishment and not the fact that they may be caught.

"Employees seemed more concerned about the actual severity of the punishment than being
caught. This may be explained by the fact that most companies
are lenient with their Internet use policies and many disciplinary
incidents were not communicated with the employees [14, 54].
Therefore, the leniency on Internet misuse and the reluctance
to expose any disciplinary incidents by the company can create
illusive impressions to other employees."

So, the employees are not given a sense of how severe it might be if they are caught misusing the internet at work. The paper goes on to give some solutions to this problem. Which in the most part it laying down guidelines that the employer gives the employees and sticks to them. Which in turn reinforces the employees to follow the guidelines and protocols set for them.

https://librarylink.uncc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=48216614&site=eds-live&scope=site

How Ethical is Office Surveillance?

      Due to the increase in cyberloafing, inappropriate emails, and lawsuits, employee monitoring has become more widespread and much easier and cheaper to use thanks to new and improved technologies. Both employers and employees are concerned with how ethical this surveillance may be. Employers are using these monitoring devices to keep track of their employees productivity, email use, and what websites the employees are viewing during the day. These employees feel that to much of this monitoring is an invasion of their privacy and can cause a conflict between the employer and employee. Therefore researchers have taken this opportunity to understand the ethics of monitoring employees and the current practices that employers are using are being explored and discussed.

     One of the most important steps an employer needs to take is by making ethical standards for all employees and educating all employees on such standards. To understand what is ethical and what is unethical you should understand some key terms. Webster's Illustrated Contemporary Dictionary states the definition of ethics as the basic principles of right actions. Values are things regarded as desirable, worthy, or right, as a belief or an ideal. Morals pertain to character and behavior from society's view of right and wrong. A belief is the acceptance of something as real or actual. Ethics can also be the decision making of actions based on a set of values, morals, and beliefs that a person possesses.

      A good question to ask yourself is, can technology change or influence our sense of values, morals, or ethics? From the information I've looked at they think yes, since technology can influence our actions and behaviors as it already has in many cases. Actions and behaviors, in turn, tend to form our values, ethics and ultimately our character; but this is a question that I believe every employee should ask themselves and so should employers.

      The internet is a huge playground for adults of many different hobbies, so let's explore some of those hobbies. According to a study conducted by ComStore Networks, 59% of on-line sales in 2002 were conducted from the shopper's workplace. Peak Internet access from work occurred between 10 A.M. and Noon. That means many employees are taking advantage of employer-provided access to the Web to conduct distinctly non-work related business. This includes shopping, bidding on on-line auctions, booking travel, visiting chat rooms, writing personal e-mails or just surfing the Internet as a hobby. One company in Seattle, N3H3, which tracks lost productivity, estimates that conducting personal business and surfing at work costs the typical 1000 employee company approximately 11 million dollars a year (Future Magazine 2003) and another study totals this to about 63 billion dollars each for American firms (http://www.huizenga.nova.edu/Jame/articles/employee-monitoring.cfm).

    Many laws have emerged since the internet was first released by the Pentagon in 1984 and the most recent on April 30, 1995 when NSF handed over control of the Internet to private sector. But the internet continues to change, evolve which in turn new laws are created and implemented into the workplace. The internet is an exciting tool that many businesses use daily for everything from inventory, to employee salaries. But the internet is also the same exciting tool that has caused many employees to lose their job over. This is where the issue of surveillance being ethical or not. Is it ethical for employees to constantly monitor all of their employees actions, and when is it to much?

http://www.huizenga.nova.edu/Jame/articles/employee-monitoring.cfm

Literacy of technology in the Workplace

Rapid changes in information and communication technologies have resulted in literacy becoming technological deixis, its meaning continuously changing as new technologies appear and as new investments  for their use are crafted. While literacy has always been destik  in an historical sense, the current period is unique because of the rapid changes in the technologies of information and communication as well as the environment they inspire. As a result, literacy is regularly being redefined within shorted time periods. This takes place as rapidly changing technologies for information and communication transform literacy and as users envision new ways of using these technologies for literate acts, transforming, in turn, the nature of these technologies.

With that said internet literacy is a driving force of the work place for research and development to increase productivity. However when taken advantage and using it for self pleasure to view non-work-related productivity it becomes a negative force to all involved.  Thus being unfair for all parties involved.

Knowing in today's age, schools are making it a higher priority to educate kids technology making them more dependent on them. Do you think it has been a negative force of some sort?     

Sources 
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1011015611937
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/internet-abuse-workplace-problem-58688.html

Internet Monitoring - Employee Defense

 Often times, we accept the technology at face value.  However, there are instances where Internet reporting technology may lead to false accusations.  In some businesses, multiple employees may have access to one computer.  This will definitely present a problem when trying to identify which employee may be violating the company’s Internet use policy. 

Secondly, there are times when the privacy of an employee’s password is compromised.  This could be either due to the employee failing to properly secure his/her password.  At my previous job, I had no less than 5 passwords, and they had to be changed periodically.  In order to remember them, I had to write them down.  Of course, I hid them in the bag I carried, but had I lost the bag, anyone could have gained access to my password.

On key step in assuring you are accusing the correct employee of violating company policy is to investigate his/her search history.  The article cited notes that, “People who abuse the Internet usually have a history of doing so.”  In short, an Internet Use Policy must work in tandem with some sort of Internet reporting technology.  Even then, steps must be taken to verify the employee guilty of abusing the Internet.

http://www.staffmonitoring.com/P32/abuse2.htm

Strategies to prevent internet misuse at work

Throughout the later examine, an extremely vast rate of organizations uncovered that a large number of their workers misuse Internet utilize that reasons diminish as a part of the benefit and effectiveness throughout working hours. Assuming that you're additionally agonized over this issue and need an adequate answer for stop Internet ill-use in the working environment, you've gone to the correct place! Softactivity.com is here to give you propelled neighborhood system observing programming Activity Monitor as a standout among the most capable and practical representative Internet utilization control results available

Tragically, numerous workers utilize their organization's Internet assets for particular needs like sending private correspondence, surfing unnecessary sites, chatting with companions and what is far more terrible offering vital business information and data. Movement Monitor is composed and submitted to secure your business from Internet misuse and abuse. When instituted this holding nothing back one representative Internet utilization control project will begin screening your office machines progressively, furtively recordings all online and disconnected from the net movements of your representatives.

Bosses might as well contribute time preparing workers on what they should or shouldn't do with electronic interchanges mediums and on the best possible conduct and convention for message and Internet utilization. Bosses can institute different sorts of programming to screen and confine representatives' Internet, PC and message use. Representatives do have some security rights. A manager can't, for instance, hack into a representative's close to all personal messages. Thinking that a worker enters a Yahoo message account on a work workstation, the head honcho can't go in and say, 'Because you utilized our Internet framework to gain entrance to Yahoo, we have the right to break into your Yahoo account.' Obviously that acts unbecomingly

.

Numerous organizations utilize a firewall to piece unapproved Internet movement, which limits access. The square could be a straightforward one that just screens out time-consuming locales, for example Face book, or it could be one utilizing stringent channels that just permit access to the organization site. A few organizations execute programming that screens different workstations on the system to verify workers are doing true work rather than squandering time.

The primary venture for an organization attempting to control Internet ill-use is to establish worthy utilize approaches for representatives, incorporating what amount of particular time is permitted on the Internet. This might incorporate a message arrangement. Notwithstanding, without electronic screening or supervision, such strategies are just enforceable by the distinction framework.

Sources:

http://energycommerce.house.gov/fact-sheet/stopping-regulatory-power-grabs-protect-internet

http://www.lifescript.com/life/money/work/how_to_stop_internet_abuse_in_the_workplace.aspx

http://www.examiner.com/article/cubicle-101-how-to-surf-the-internet-at-work

Cultural View (Age groups)

—Age groups have become a major influence in how employees work during their work day. Many often using scheduled work time for personal consumption.

—The age group that misused the internet the most at work were the younger employees that fell in the age range of 18 to 35 years. Which is a reflection on how society has adapted with constant interaction with other outlets. However blame cannot be just on social media, but on other third party websites as well. Opening another tab and viewing other websites have become so easy with rapid improvements in technology making  distractions greater than ever.  

Why do 18-35 age groups feel like it's appropriate to misuse the internet in the workplace:

• Not feeling challenged at work.
• Work too many hours.
• The company doesn't give sufficient incentive to work harder.
• They are unsatisfied with their career.
• Just plain bored.

I do believe that programs such as "Staff Monitoring Solutions" is required in today's work place to insure quality and time is effective to the highest degree. Tools such as: "Blocking, Monitoring, Capturing, Management and Reporting." This will help protect both sides of employment like fraud in the workplace to other conduct related implications. Saving cost can be high:

• Do you think upper management should take age in consideration when hiring new employees knowing that younger (18-35) use the internet for personal use rather than work related productivity? 
• Who should be blamed for why 18-35 misuse the internet in the work place? Employer or Employee? 

Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2012/07/17/employees-really-do-waste-time-at-work/
http://employee-monitoring-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

LittleBrother

New technologies are popping up to allow employers to surveillance almost everything an employee does on a computer. Your boss can not only go onto your hard drive and check to see where you've have gone on the internet but read your email. This "check up" seemed too complicated with the number of employees in a company, so a software package is now made available to do the monitoring for you. This software has flagged over 45,000 Web sites that are either categorized as "productive", "unproductive", or "neutral", and also rates employees based on their browsing history. This software is so intelligent that it will also identify the most frequent users and popular sites. This software is called LittleBrother.

When you're working now, you may be in constant fear of being reprimanded for spending personal time on your computer while on the job. Did you delete that email that was sent from your computer about your boss? Did you accidentally go to Facebook out of habit? These may be questions you think about that can threaten your job security. 

"Beyond worry about lost productivity, employers have legitimate concerns about the use of e-mail in thefts of proprietary information, which, according to the "Handbook on White Collar Crime," account for more than $2 billion in losses a year" (SLU). Programs such as LittleBrother are programmed to catch suspect words to find potential instances of theft through email and hopefully cut down on financial losses in businesses. 

An example of this "crime" was a case of a former employee of Cadence Systems. He was charged with stealing proprietary information with the intent of bringing it to a rival software maker. This employee was caught due to the fact that he sent a file that contained 5 million bytes to his personal email before leaving the company. Such a large message alerted his employer and suggested that he might be sending "source code for the company's products" which prompted his employer to contact the police. 

In situations like these, it is hard to say that surveillance isn't necessary. The intrusion of privacy to prevent unproductive employees is one issue, but it's a different and acceptable intrusion of privacy when it comes to preventing theft and a company losing millions of dollars.

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v9n2/brother.html

IUP Law Suite

                      Most companies would agree that having an IUP (Internet Usage Policy) document integrated into their work. An IUP allows the company to monitor their employees emails, web searches, and even key strokes.  Content Technologies launched software called Pornsweeper that examines images attached to e-mails and searches picture files for anything that appears to be human flesh. SpectorSoft Corp., a Florida-based software company, released a monitoring program that takes surreptitious "screen shots" of employees' computers at selected intervals for employers to view at a later date. From a business point of view having something like this increases productivity, and helps terminate employees who are not willing to follow the rules.  But how do employees feel about a document that now doesn't allow communication with loved ones, or for the employee to simply take a break. I found a law suite from the employees point of view and although he doesn't win, he does draw some interesting points of violation of privacy.

               Michael A. Smyth was a regional operations manager at the Pillsbury Company. Smyth had a company email account that he was able to access from work and home. Pillsbury, on multiple occasions, told its employees that all email communications were private, confidential, and that there was no danger of the messages being intercepted and used as grounds for discipline or termination. In October 1994, while at home, Smyth received emails from his supervisor and, thinking his replies would not be intercepted or used against him, made threatening comments. Pillsbury intercepted the emails and, despite the previous assurances made to the employees, terminated him. Smyth brought a wrongful discharge suit against Pillsbury, claiming that his right to privacy had been violated when his emails were intercepted.

                Although Michael's law suite brought him no justice, it does make you wonder. What if you were in his shoes and arguing with your employer. What if your boss decided to send you messages that were unpleasant and when you sent something back in anger the message was read in the wrong text or perceived as being harmful and you lost your job. I understand that this man made a threat but what is the limit with employers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smyth_v._Pillsbury_Co.
http://www.iabc.com/cwb/archive/2004/0304/legal.htm

Cyber-slacking may be a good thing?

Cyber-slacking or cyber-loafing is defined as, "the use of an employer's Internet and e-mail for personal activities during work hours" by dictionary.com. This blog will try to explore cyber-slacking and all of its aspects.

For this inaugural post I am going to ask a question. How do you, the reader, view cyberslacking at work? A bad thing? A non-issue? or somewhere in between? If you do a Google search for cyberslacking in the workplace you get articles that talk about how it is detrimental to productivity and articles that talk about how it boosts productivity. It is detrimental for the obvious reasons. It takes your focus away from your work. But in an article put out by the Telegraph, "'Cyberslacking' at work has benefits, claims study", it says that companies that try to clamp down and eradicate the problem is futile since our world is becoming more interconnected and complex. The study within the article claims that by allowing employees taking mini-breaks throughout the work day they are actually more productive than working straight through. So I ask the question again, do you view cyber-slacking as a good thing or a bad thing?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3357631/Cyberslacking-at-work-has-benefits-claims-study.html