kalikshama
Posts: 14805
Joined: 8/8/2010 Status: offline
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A survey by America Online and Salary.com concluded that employers spend nearly $760 billion a year paying employees to goof off on the Web. And with the ever-increasing popularity of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, the urge to goof off instead of working increases daily. While a certain degree of personal online usage may be perfectly okay, the goal here is to stop employees who waste HOURS online and/or to prevent employees from accessing damaging online content such as pornography or gambling web sites, as well as preventing them from downloading illegal software, inviting viruses into your network or spamming out racist or off-color jokes using your company e-mail – all of which can create bigger problems legally and financially. Two Simple Fixes So what’s a business owner to do? 1. First, make sure you have a good AUP or acceptable use policy in place that outlines what employees can and cannot do online or with company e-mail and resources. If you have one, make sure it’s updated to include the use of social media sites and rules on sharing confidential company information. 2. Next, we recommend installing good content filtering software that will “police” the network for you 24x7x365. Although we cannot provide any legal advice, one of the things we recommend is working with a computer consultant to establish an “acceptable use policy” that outlines how employees can use company resources, such as their e-mail, Internet, and electronic equipment. Your consultant should also be able to help you set up the monitoring software that can either allow management to govern employee access to certain web sites, such as gambling, porn, career sites, etc., or block employees from those sites all together.
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