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The following headlines and statistics have been gathered about how you're supposedly being ripped off by your employees. These are the same exact employees who, the Department of Labor now says, cost employers an average of $20.00 per hour ($42K annually) to retain. If you sign the payroll, the following five sentences may cause nausea, resentment or hysterical blindness.
Nonwork related Internet surfing results in up to a 40 percent loss in productivity each year in American businesses! Some 86 percent of all employees use office e-mail for personal reasons! Seventy percent of all Web traffic to Internet pornography sites occurs between the work hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.! Want more? Sixty-four percent of employees have received offensive e-mails at work, 24 percent of American workers admit to shopping online at work and even more cop to watching sports online while "working."
Is your heart pumping now? Is there tingling in your left arm? Does your wallet hurt? If so, then maybe you have sped over the first three speed bumps on the treacherous hairpin turn known as critical thinking: Is the source of these statistics credible and unbiased, is the data reasonable and who performed and benefits from this study? Having jumped the gun myself on biased information, I offer up this cautionary scenario as healthy friction to any premature actions you might take in your future and as an icy coolant to chill out any feverish future overreactions.
Here's the lowdown on the Internet abuse statistics you've just read. The source of the factoids is a private company; however, they are not survey specialists. The data did not come from a single comprehensive study with consistently applied controls. As it turns out, this company distributes software that documents and archives employee Internet activity. Surprise! Our helpful little company is in the employee monitoring business. That connection doesn't negate the data entirely, but you might agree that it does raise concerns about its purity of purpose.
The Lure And Hold Of The Internet
Broadband access to the Internet in the workplace is both a magical device and a devilish snare, but it wasn't always that way. The Internet was first created as a socially neutral platform meant to facilitate research and communication between academic and military agencies. It had little cultural impact. Its adolescence was defined by the dot-com gold rush, demonstrating nearly unfathomable growth fueled by an explosion of Web pages, domain name grabs and speculative business development by hordes of panting Internet millionaire wannabes.
The Internet of 2007 is now so vastly different from the Internet of Y2K that it has even been given a new name — Web: 2.0. No longer just a technological revolution, Web 2.0 has more than delivered on its promise of social impact on a planetary scale with rich, user-driven experiences like blogging, the rise of citizen journalists, shopping and gaming sites. The Web 2.0 is fast becoming the ultimate distraction from the uncompromising real world. It also comes with hooks creating a new clinical phenomenon: Internet addiction.
The Rights Of Businesses, The Wrongs Of Cyberslackers
Earlier in my career, B.I. (Before Internet), I had supervisory responsibility for a good number of employees. Our company put great emphasis on fairness. Management worked hard and we needed our people to work hard, too. We offered solid pay, a full benefit package and a safe, modern facility. These were good stable jobs with both a path for future growth and a path to management's open door. We tried to hire only productive people but we sometimes made mistakes and took on a time thief. You know the infuriating type. Visiting somewhere fascinating, like cyberspace, was not required in order to waste time, and they didn't need instant messages to disrupt and annoy your other hard workers. They could cut a path of destruction with a post-lunch stroll and a stale joke.
No business should tolerate employees who chronically slack off and become industrious only when it comes to creatively stealing time and a paycheck. However, when it comes to performance and time, I would urge any owner who still believes that a paycheck buys a person's time by the minute, to carefully reconsider the expiration date on that scenario. You can reasonably expect that from a machine,but not a human being. There has been a significant turnaround in the last decade when it comes to the incredibly valuable role that today's knowledge workers play within an organization. If you're not certain, try to answer this: Do you pay employees for minutes they work or for accomplishments? Knowledge workers are renewable, remarkable resources, not machine assets. Today, you might find it more appropriate to think of an employer as a contractor, hiring a person with talent to accomplish a set of particular goals for total compensation that makes the work profitable for both the employer and the talent.
If the offending staffer can't be coached to respect the environment that you've created and change their ways, then they should be quickly fired for cause. That act will demonstrate your commitment to keeping a fair and productive workplace far more effectively than any policy statement ever could. Giving just the offending party the bum's rush proves your dedication to an ideal. You are no longer just a boss who loves paper rules — you are an action hero upholding standards, protecting your people and kicking slacker butt.
The Right Point Of Attack?
Many companies have already implemented some form of Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) when it comes to the Internet. Restrictions are placed on employees so that only work-related matters (including e-mail) get access to the Internet. Potentially harmful sites and downloads are blocked and certain activities curtailed. Monitoring software often silently polices your employee's activities including any clumsy attempts to beat the system and walk on the wild side. Concerns about such policies rarely question the rights owners possess to insist on a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. I question the acceptable use strategy and blanket controls because it's unclear if restrictions and monitoring are the right point of attack. It is akin to padlocking the pantry in order to improve the eating habits of your family.
If you are committed to developing a policy like this, try swinging for the fences by integrating other nagging personal use vs. professional use hotspots (telephone, electronic messaging systems, e-mail, computer files, etc.) into one larger umbrella statement. In recent years these policies have become more prevalent and proven out through judicial review. Organizations of all sizes have made unequivocal declarations about expectations of privacy by telling staffers that all files, communications, personal passwords, etc. were company property and to never expect otherwise. Is it legal and entirely defensible to take this stand? The courts say yes. Is it fair and right and, most importantly, appropriate for adults that you otherwise trust with your very livelihood? Here's where it gets sticky.
Abusers And Bad Apples
In asking you to consider a different viewpoint, we need to acknowledge the role of workplace abusers and the decidedly low-tech tools they've used over the decades to spoil bunches of good apples for us all. Spoilers spoil things by going over the line, taking too much or taking advantage. Spoilers busy themselves by wrecking things for the rest of us. I will, however, be the first to admit that the Internet offers some unique, far out, occasionally perverse and hard to foresee ways of stealing time and starting trouble. But the fact is, spoilers were here causing resentment and disturbing the peace long before binary code and Bill Gates arrived — when there was no such thing as the Internet. They created their own ingenious ways to steal your time without the help of a gambling Web site or a stripper-cam.
The telephone was introduced and it was a great productivity killer in the hands of an abuser (and still is), but we didn't respond to the personal phone call abusers by restricting everyone's access or installing equipment to monitor every employee's calls. Did we under react then or are we over reacting now? Were there less alarming articles about telephone abuse? Were studies performed that showed productivity losses due to misuse of telephones?
Low-tech Loafers
Owners and work groups throughout the 20th century were always beset by some minority of selfish employees (and loafers) who seemed unconcerned with improving productivity, fairly dividing the workload or shielding company property from unacceptable personal use by employees. We had compulsive shoppers long before Amazon and eBay, ordering by telephone during working hours and essentially converting the warehouse into their own personal shipping point. Cleaning people always seemed to discover the crumpled evidence of the guys who stuffed their old-fashioned paper porn into the backs of their desk drawers. We have had inside salespeople more committed to hitting the goal numbers in the sale of candy and raffle tickets for their kids. Other folks burned your time by spending hours energetically organizing a group lottery purchase or coordinating a co-worker's birthday celebration.
It seems every company had one person spending half of their working hours making, drinking and remaking coffee — it was their life. Serial job seekers didn't emerge from their shell in the year 2000; they've always been here delivering the slacker's equivalent of a coup de grace by always betraying one employer (and taking their paycheck) while courting the next. They did it without Monster.com. Instead, they used an everyday prop — the newspaper folded just right to hide the red-circled classified ads of their next victim.
Then, there were the real snakes in the grass: the professional spoilers, looking lost in thought at their desk, walking through the shop with a clipboard and a highlighter, staring at the same technical manual for hours, chatting up the boss purely for political gain, etc. A bum? You bet. However, it was rare that everyone felt the sting of a company wide restriction solely because a bad apple or two misused a company asset. We have historically handled these people directly through personal intervention, warnings, job reassignments and dirty looks. Corporate America did not outlaw newspapers or coffee at work, and the compulsive shopper's catalogs and credit cards were not confiscated at the front door.
When You Treat Employees Like Adults
Sometimes restrictive policies can create their own psychological backlash you'd never expect. Adult workers, who are also parents, can find it particularly distressing to be confronted with a rule or new law at work that reminds them of their own recent parenting actions.
The worker, as a parent, might have recently outlawed Internet access for his own children and your new policy becomes a target for turbocharged resentment. A transference happens and a rattled employee might not even be very aware of why they suddenly believe that management is comprised of meddling snoops and rats. Suddenly they are the 14-year-old kid. Simply put, when you treat employees like adults, then they will tend to act like adults. Do your best to hire people with an actual work ethic and common sense. You will see those adults attempt to move heaven and earth to make you money. When a firm implements a very strict Internet usage policy, morale can be really hurt, prompting people to spruce up their résumés and test the waters of the job market in search of friendlier and less controlling policies.
Some Questions To Consider
- The world gets many headlines about personal surfing at work, but has anyone studied whether this was actually damaging to a business? Is it possible that personal surfing actually substitutes for tasks that would normally take an employee away from work? Do people who personally surf at work tend to make it up by doing work from their home computer or talking business through their lunch times? These answers are unknown but perhaps they should be researched before organizations move forward with unpopular policies.
- Does today's sped-up work environment actually require that certain workers take multiple short breaks in order to actually work the pace of 2007? Does personal surfing happen when an employee is tied up on hold or multitasking to everyone's benefit? Might these mental breaks most likely happen during a lull in the action or when an employee is effectively caught up? Is anyone — including people at the very top — ever expected to stay on task for 28,800 continuous seconds per eight-hour day? Do the people who use your systems for their personal use tend to stay after hours helping a customer or finishing a project or do they fly out right at 5 p.m.?
- Has anybody looked to see how naturally abusive people who were blocked from personal surfing found other ways to waste time?
- Do companies that try to quantify and monitor every single activity, keep employees shackled to their desks, restrict workplace amenities (like access to the best of the Interet) that make life a bit more pleasant and demand 100 percent purity of effort, ultimately create a dehumanizing environment defined by resentment and excessive turnover?
- More importantly, do companies that recognize a degree of inevitability when it comes to how all employees devote themselves during a stressful workday and then allow for some reasonable portion of personal time vs. professional time, somehow end up with happier, more loyal and ultimately more productive employees?
An Alternate Strategy
The Internet (including the now-critical e-mail) is so massive that it has its own gravity and the benefits to you and your entire organization are simply immense. The revolutionary leap in scale, scope and schooling matched with the continuous merger of the Internet with telephone, television, film, education, romance, research, investment, politics and music makes it bullet proof to overstatement. The Internet is critically important to nearly every economic and social system in our world. All in all, it's a pretty tough thing to harness, suppress or restrict.
On top of everything, there is just no denying its power as a distraction from everyday objectives. Presented with a double-edged sword of a problem, our first question does not have to be, "should we or shouldn't we restrict access to this?" Instead, our first question should be, "does restricting access to the Internet even work?" And then, "what kind of collateral damage might these restrictions produce in the workplace?" Closing it off or locking it down just doesn't feel like a well-educated response to a potential problem with such a fantastic technological gift. Perhaps it's best to use a simpler measure to determine if any one thing is such a distraction as to be harmful to your business or a drain on your team's productivity.
Start by creating a lean organization. Make certain that your staff has been tasked with a fair, but still very challenging slate of duties and responsibilities and then give them the training and the tools to get that work done. Hold a meeting or two that encourages everyone to use the Internet appropriately, ethically and professionally. After the right amount of time has passed, use your investigative skills to see if the appropriate amount of work is actually getting done by each member of your staff. Focus on whether or not a person gets a job done, gets it done well and gets it done fast enough to be worth what you're paying for it.
Today, a strong case could be made for performance being the ultimate measure of who works and what works — is there really anything else? Your employees could see restrictions as the difference between a lockdown mentality and enlightened and progressive 21st century management. Which mind-set do you believe will attract those movers of heaven and earth that the most successful businesses always seem to find?
About the author:
Chris Traynor, SPHR, is the Director for Whip-Smart™ Management Consulting LLC, Wayne, N.J., and has 25 years of experience in the solid surface industry as a consultant to fabricators, distributors and manufacturers. He can be reached at ctraynor@whip-smart.com.
author: By Chris Traynor