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