Is personal Internet usage costing your company $$$$?

The benefits of the Internet are endless. With instant access to data and email, the Internet has become a money-saving tool for companies worldwide. However, it can also be a tool for wasted employee productivity. Can a company stop employee loss of productivity due to personal Internet use without hindering productivity? Are companies at risk for what their employees are doing on the Internet? Does personal Internet use affect business operations? Answers: Yes, Yes, and Yes!

Loss of Productivity

Anyone can log onto the Internet and do anything from pay bills to manage stock accounts. With more and more companies providing online access to their services, the need to do personal business online has become second nature to most people. When do employees find time to do personal online tasks? Studies show that the average employee spends about one hour a day surfing the Web for personal use. Added up over time, if that person makes $20/hour, that equates to $5000/year. Just think if you had 20 employees at $20/hour?

Legal Responsibility

Is a company responsible for personal Internet usage even if it is prohibited in the company’s rules for Internet usage? If an employee is viewing offensive material and this offends another employee, yes, the company is liable, and action can be taken against the company. Many companies today suspend or terminate their employees when they are found visiting offensive, gambling, or pornographic websites. Monitoring Internet usage is the only way to insure employees are not visiting these types of websites.

Business Operations

Do employees complain about slow access to shared programs, files, or the Internet periodically throughout the day. If so, the likely culprit is someone downloading unnecessary materials from the Internet. Each Internet connection is given a specific data transfer rate from their Internet Service Provider. Each time data is transferred, it affects the transfer rate. Because downloading large files, such as music or games, takes up a great deal of the space provided, the network slows down to a crawl. When multiple people are doing this all at once, it can all but stop your network.

What can a company do?

It is an employer’s responsibility to provide their employees with adequate resources to complete their job functions. Many positions today require access to the Internet to carry out those job functions. It is also an employer’s responsibility to provide their employees with an Internet Usage Policy, which clearly defines what is acceptable use of the Internet. However, this will only affect “honest” employees. Blocking unwanted websites is an alternative, but hundreds of new websites are added to the Internet daily. A company would practically have to hire a person just to add new websites to the list daily. So, what does a company do to stop Internet abuse by it’s employees?

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