Email, Web Surfing Hazardous to Your Career?
A large percentage of companies surveyed by the American Management Society and the ePolicy institute have canned workers for email and Web surfing abuses. According to ComputerWorld's report on the survey over 25% have fired for misusing email and about 33% have terminated employees for Web abuse, especially for surfing porn sites on the job.
Of course these are numbers of companies that have canned anyone for either abuse. If we surveyed all Fortune 500 companies I bet we'd find 100% of the companies have fired at least one employee for at least one of these offenses.
The number who use deep surveillance techniques , like keystroked monitoring, and monitor blogs is high (from CW):
Companies use different methods to monitor workers' computers, with 45 percent of those participating in the survey tracking content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. An additional 43 percent store and review computer files. Twelve percent monitor blogs to track content about the company and 10 percent monitor social-networking sites.
Anyone who surfs for porn at work deserves a career-version Darwin Award, the rest of us can do without the uber monitoring. Some is required to protect the business and employees but as with all else in life, balance is key.
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