Posted : May 2011
Author : the admin
Employers approach employee internet usage in a variety of
ways. Some employers simply provide a written policy stating their rules about
internet usage via company computers. This puts the employees on an honor
system, but one that can potentially be monitored by the company and enforced
by disciplinary measures. Other employers are choosing to block certain types
of sites completely, to assist their employees in avoiding the temptation. If you are considering blocking employee’s access to certain
types of sites, which types should you consider?
Gambling
Gambling, regardless of whether it actually
involves money or not, can be quite addicting to some people. You may be
feeding that addiction if those sites are available to your employees.
Adult
This can be a big temptation for many
employees. Loss of time is not your only worry with these sites. Adult sites
are notorious for malware and virus attacks on computers. Visits to these types
of sites could put your whole network at risk.
Social Networking
Besides the amount of time that can
easily be wasted on sites like facebook and MySpace, people do tend to be a bit
loose-tongued in reporting their immediate thoughts and feelings over these
viral networks. Employee’s may inadvertently post comments regarding their work
that you’d rather they didn’t make public.
Auction
Ebay and other auction sites can be a big
temptation to those who have made them a daily part of their lives for either
selling or buying, or both. Seconds can easily turn into minutes when browsing
through your ‘Watched’ items.
Shopping
Amazon is only one of many shopping sites
that employers choose to ban. Browsing is one thing, but once someone decides
to buy…they’ll be committing some extra to the checkout process.
Sports
Sports sites may seem harmless until you see a
whole crowd of your employee’s standing around one guy’s monitor discussing the
latest game replays. For some reason, sports viewing tends to be a team sport.
News
Why would you care about your employee’s
visiting a news site? Again, it is the time element. News headlines are
designed to grab people’s attention, and they do. They begin to read the article,
and then they get to the place where it says: “Read more…” They’re hooked.
Gaming
Gaming is by nature competitive. And like
gambling, it can be very addicting to its participants. Minutes on a gaming
site can turn into an hour without the employee even realizing it.
Video Sharing
Youtube and other video sharing sites
are a lot of fun to look at. They are pure entertainment. Unless you are paying
your employees to keep themselves entertained, you may want to add these to
your blocked sites as well.
Proxy
These are sites that people use to hide their
computer’s identity while they are surfing the web. These sites can pose a
security risk to your company’s network and should definitely be on the list of
blocked sites.
There may be some of these sites that your employees do need
to access from time to time for legitimate work related reasons, but those can
be addressed on an individual basis while still blocking the rest of these
non-essential sites.
~Blog Admin~
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