Web Control

The various companies I visit in the course of my profession range across the entire spectrum when it comes to granting employees access to the internet.

At one extreme, I have a client that only allows web access to Managers and above. They won't even give email to the rest of their staff.

At the other extreme are clients who place no restrictions at all on their employees related to internet activities. However, I believe some of those clients do monitor web activities of employees and will deal with excessive browsing or visits to inappropriate sites.

For me, the restrictive companies seem counterproductive. I've directly observed the inefficiency of being unable to communicate with staff members in the company that denies all web access to employees.

Many companies restrict access to certain types of sites, such as game sites, porn sites, social networking sites and blogs.

It reminds me of when an old employer of mine implemented a no-smoking policy. Employees could not smoke in the office, but could only smoke in designated outdoor smoking areas.

There was a high percentage of smokers in the operations department. Since it was a trucking company, those employees were responsible for taking customer and driver calls, coordinating pickups and deliveries and giving instructions to drivers.

So the smoking ban sent those folks outside for their nicotine fix. Problem was that they were spending almost as much time away from their post on smoke breaks as at their desk performing their duties. Naturally, their non-smoking co-workers became offended by a perceived special treatment that allowed the smokers much longer and more frequent breaks.

Of course, technically those smokers were not permitted any more or longer breaks than anyone else. They simply were taking them on their own initiatives to feed their nicotine addictions.

So rather than dealing with the problem by cracking down on enforcement of scheduled breaks, their managers decided to rescind the non-smoking policy for that department. By allowing the smokers to resume their habits at their desks, important calls were no longer missed and business went back to normal.

One little problem with their approach to that problem: People were hired during the non-smoking policy under the promise of a smoke-free workplace. Some of those people were intolerant of cigarette smoke with specific respiratory problems. Guess what happened when the managers of the operations department rescinded the non-smoking policy.

I think restriction of web access for employees is something of a parallel to the smoking ban. Shutting down web access is lazy management. Managers don't want the responsibility or the conflict of having to deal with an employee who might be abusing the priviledge of web access at work, so they choose to shut it down completely.

I like to listed to web radio at work, which is blocked by many companies. Perhaps if it's blocked due to a possible bandwidth problem, I could see the logic of that policy.

But otherwise, employees should be treated like adults. Tell them up-front that they will have web access, but are expected to limit web browsing and avoid inappropriate sites. If they visit inappropriate sites or their web browsing affects their job performance, they will be verbally warned the first time, receive a written warning to go into their Personnel file the second time, and will be terminated the third time.

Very simple, but lazy managers don't want to be bothered.