Web Surfing

When I was in the corporate world, I often wondered how much time is lost at the workplace when employees spend their workday on the ESPN or Fox News websites when they should be doing what they are paid for. We are working longer hours to do the work that should be done in a forty hour work week. Imagine the work that could be done if the web was not so easily accessible at work.


Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing news, sports or pornography from their computers, grew six fold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times. Taxpayer money that is wasted on employees who would rather check up on the news.

The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.

"To manage this dramatic increase without an increase in staff required us to significantly reduce our efforts to investigate grant fraud," the inspector general recently told Congress in a budget request. "We anticipate a significant decline in investigative recoveries and prosecutions in coming years as a direct result."

The budget request doesn't state the nature or number of the misconduct cases, but records obtained by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act laid bare the extent of the well-publicized porn problem inside the government-backed foundation.

There are an incredible amount of tools out there to prohibit unauthorized use of the web and also to institute a big brother type of policy in the workplace. Why this is not done in more businesses is totally beyond me.

The internet can be an addiction to some people. For some it is a way to do their work productively. Regardless of why you use the web at work it is part of our lives in the work place.

Without exception, it is completely legal for an employer to monitor an employee’s online activity and information on a computer that is provided by the company. During working hours, after working hours, data saved to a “private” folder on the hard drive, emails sent from a work-provided email address, and even emails sent from a personal email address using said computer. This information is all legally accessible by the employer – even if it is password-protected.

Even after an employee leaves a company, the employer is within its rights to access and review activity and information from said employee’s computer during her tenure. This 2008 Techdirt.com article reiterates the fact that “anything on the computer is fair game for the employer (even if it's password protected. But it is important to know the facts: Financial information can and may legally be accessed by her employer if you are using any website on your work computer. Even if you manager condones you taking 5 minutes to do some personal budgeting during the day, another unscrupulous colleague could very well be accessing your personal information

While it is legal for employers to monitor and access the activity and information noted above, it goes without saying that many do not. It’s just important to know that they can. The majority of employers I have had, as well as those of my family, colleagues, and friends, will not admonish a competent and productive employee for spending some personal time online during the work day or at home on a work-provided machine. Let’s face it: Most of us work upwards of 40 hours per week and there are bills to be paid, news headlines to be read, and personal correspondence to attend to—and just not enough hours after work to manage all of it. In addition, more and more employers are encouraging their employees to spend some time online each day in non-task-related/billable activities—social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter or company blogs being examples of potentially positive ways to gain knowledge, share information, and promote the company via nontraditional methods. Sometimes it is alright to use the web and sometimes it is not.

Follow me on twitter at https://twitter.com/drcchasse


E-mail me at drcchasse@verizon.net to get on our mailing list.

Please forward to your friends and colleagues to enjoy. The more readers I have, the more money that is raised for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
voice 206-350-6437