How to ensure that your employees are doing all that they can to make money for the company and keep you out of court...
The Problem
Employee productivity is always important, even more so during hard economic times. As we work with clients, we find that one of the biggest hits to productivity and profitability is the Internet. We all spend some time online doing personal tasks—personal email, an occasional purchase, social networking, etc., but how much time is too much? While most companies have some sort of acceptable use policy (sometimes unspoken), few have the tools in place to know where their employees are spending their time and how much time they are spending.
The issue transcends mere productivity however, as employers can be held liable for employee behavior using company resources on company time. In many cases, companies think in terms of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but that is a recipe for disaster. Spending time in chat sessions, posting on forums, and using social networking sites can lead to the need for a very expensive legal defense should any of those behaviors exceed legal or moral boundaries.
We consider the following to be best practices when establishing and enforcing an acceptable use policy for network resources:
1) Install a network monitoring and reporting tool on your network. Let it run for a few weeks, and then look at the information that it captures. Doing this before issuing an acceptable use policy will give you visibility into what activity has been occurring that you may be liable for in court.
2) Draft an acceptable use policy and have it reviewed by your corporate council, then follow their direction on rolling it out to the company.
3) Keep monitoring your network use and take action as appropriate.
We have recently included network use in our network audits, and all of our managed clients receive monitoring reports as part of our management service. This is one of those areas where “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” for any company, large or small.
Take Action!
If you recognize the importance of maintaining productivity and the value of staying out of court defending yourself against the actions of a bad employee but do not have the time or skills to take action, call us at 503-241-3499 and we will do a preliminary audit for free. We will tell you who is going where, and how much time (and your money) they are spending on non-productive (or worse) activities, and help you decrease liability and increase productivity. In some cases, using our services and solutions can more than pay for itself in recovered productivity alone, and the cost of staying out of court or the newspapers—well, that is priceless...
Give us a call at 503-241-3499 for more details. Δ