"Misusing e-mail or browsing the wrong sites can cost you your job. Ms. Newitt was aware her employer, the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, had a policy restricting personal use of work computers, but she believed it focused on Web surfing, not e-mail. Nonetheless, she was careful to use her work e-mail primarily for professional matters. So she was stunned when the agency fired her after finding 418 personal e-mail messages received over a period of five months (or about 5 per workday) on her PC.
Newitt isn't alone: Increasingly, managers are cracking down on employee Internet activity by drafting strict usage policies--and enforcing them through use of software that monitors surfing, examines e-mail, and restricts the sites an employee can browse to.
Newitt, an eight-year agency veteran, says that she received great performance reviews as well as certificates for providing outstanding customer service in her position as a workers' compensation claims manager. Most of the personal e-mail messages were innocuous notes regarding birthday greetings and lunch plans with coworkers, she says. But none of this mattered when Newitt's employer examined her office's e-mail after a co-worker filed a sexual-harassment complaint against a supervisor. The department ultimately fired 8 employees (including Newitt) and disciplined 16 others for their improper use of agency equipment.
Mr.Vehrs, who works at the Virginia Department of Business Assistance, received a ten-day unpaid suspension for excessive casual use of the Internet while at work. Vehrs employer knew he blogged. In fact, Virginia's governor read and sometimes reused his posts; but he was punished.
A 2005 survey of 526 businesses and organizations by the ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association found that 76 percent of them monitor the sites that their employees visit, and 65 percent block certain sites. At least 55 percent of them review and retain employees' e-mail, and 36 percent track the content on workers PCs, their keystrokes, and the time that they spend at the keyboard. Lost productivity is a major concern.
For example, Networks Unlimited found that fewer than 100 employees at Balls Food--a supermarket and pharmacy chain based in Kansas City--had Net access at work, but that they spent a total of 686 hours in one year using Web-based e-mail such as Hotmail and Yahoo.
By contrast, 120 employees at a New York-based software company spent an estimated 7700 hours in one year accessing Web-based e-mail, 2400 hours at shopping and sports-related sites, and 250 hours visiting Adult sites.
In total, the employees spent more than 17,000 hours in one year on recreational surfing (roughly 3 hours per employee per week), which translates into an estimated loss in worker productivity of $867,000, according to Networks Unlimited."
