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A study looking at the monitoring practices of nearly 200 American companies found that 26 percent of managers monitored employees' online activities all the time, not just when something gave them a reason to investigate.
At the same time, a quarter of the organizations surveyed by Bentley College's Centre for Business Ethics have no procedures or safeguards to ensure that corporate snooping isn't abused. What's more, almost half of the firms lack written guidelines, policies or procedures for monitoring. According to ZDNet Australia, a new bandwidth-monitoring system could lead to employees who surf the Net at work receiving a bill each month for the cost of borrowed bandwidth and wasted time.
Most analysts, however, say employees should be cut some slack when it comes to personal Internet use. After all, the types of people that many firms want to attract — computer savvy 20-somethings — are precisely the group of people who would be repelled by companies' heavy-handed policies.
Randolph Kahn, an internationally recognized risk consultant and lawyer, recommends to his corporate clients that they create clearcut, black-and-white policies about acceptable use to avoid trouble.
The case of Dow Chemical is a "perfect example." In 2002, a female employee complained that all the men working around her were calling up porn and transmitting the photos by email.
"She said she was tired of it and it was a violation of company policy. She brought it to the attention of company executives and the next day they summarily fired 50 people and put dozens of others on leave," says Kahn, author of the recently released Information Nation: Seven Keys to Information Management Compliance.
Stellar Internet Monitoring, one of many companies offering software or services to track workers' online activities, has seen its business grow by 20 percent a year. Stellar uses electronic sniffers to watch net traffic for its corporate clients and automatically generate usage reports for each employee. It tracks not just email and web surfing, but instant messages swapped across connections. The results of the tracking are stored for several years — just in case.
Its president, Don Innis, knows of a case where a union filed a grievance, looking to get workers more time off at Christmas because company executives with Internet access were spending hours gift shopping online. It demanded the workers get equal shopping time during their workday.
"Certainly people shouldn't be, in December, shopping on the Internet for hours. Normally people who have access to the Internet are some of your better employees. Some of these people are getting paid a lot."
Gerrits, the former staffer at the insurance firm that fired the porn collector, says the company tried to take a balanced approach after it introduced general access to the Internet in 2000.
"When we introduced the Internet we said, 'We're giving this to you, we're going to treat you like adults. If it's your lunch break and you have to buy plane tickets, go ahead and do that. But don't cut into your work time.'"
Keri Spooner, a senior lecturer in employment relations and human resource management, says firms should have clear policies. But she suggests going too far will hurt the company.
"Successful organizations — or those seeking success — require motivated and intelligent staff. They do not require obedient slaves. Individuals faced with no freedom of action will soon move on," Spooner says.
"Moreover, the law in advanced economies generally recognizes the right of individuals to 'reasonable' communications with family and friends during working hours. In this respect, the Internet is no different from the access to a newspaper or to a telephone during working hours." The Internet is also a vast resource of knowledge that smart firms will want their workers to have access to, Spooner says.
In fact, some companies are helping employees use the Internet rather than trying to limit them. According to Investor's Business Daily, "Whirlpool and Eddie Bauer are among the firms that have set up Web portals designed to meet employees' needs. Through these portals, employees can access the sites necessary to conduct personal business such as planning a wedding or applying for a mortgage loan. The firms argue that much of the personal business employees conduct can be taken care of only during normal business hours. If employees do not use the Internet to conduct that business, they will likely do so over the telephone, which can be an even more time-consuming process."
