Early this week, I riffed on a recent AMA study that showed many companies had fired employees for excessive Internet usage. My take, which remains the same, is that excessive Internet usage is a performance problem - you have to manage performance if you think someone is spending way too much time on the web.
If someone is exceeding expectations and spending three hours a day browsing the offerings of YouTube, you might have a job design issue there, Skippy....
So it's been established that I'm a proponent of freedom in the workplace. However, there's an exception to every rule.
When are employee Internet habits no longer an individual performance issue? That's simple - when the collective video appetites of your organization bring your network to its knees. From a Wall Street Journal article on the impact of YouTube on corporate bandwidth:
"William Bailey, IT manager at Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County in San Jose, Calif., says he has to block video at the 400-person nonprofit to ensure that the agency's network will remain operational. "It's a real issue when a network can't handle demand, and too much media, particularly video, is usually the reason why," he says. For people like Shawn Birkett, such shutdowns can thwart both legitimate work and extracurricular video-watching. A sales executive with wireless equipment company Moonblink Communications Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., Mr. Birkett used to spend about an hour and a half a day looking at online video, often related to his company's customers. Then six months ago, Moonblink blocked all Internet video after IT managers found that streaming audio and video had slowed the company's Internet service.
Meanwhile, R.J. Griffin & Co., a subsidiary of J.E. Dunn Construction Group, says it plans to block employee access to Internet video over the next few months. The 600-person Atlanta company is grappling with the housing downturn and is looking for ways to conserve spending. But the company also wants to add capacity to its existing network. Jason Cunningham, IT director for R.J. Griffin, says blocking video could save the company from making a potentially costly technology upgrade.
Mr. Cunningham recently found that YouTube was the most popular Web site visited by R.J. Griffin employees, receiving 3,000 hits a month. To prevent any employee backlash, he plans to issue a report explaining the threat that video poses to bandwidth."
So there you have it. Use the corporate pipe with respect or face the ultimate in sanctions - the blocking of YouTube.
Shout out to my IT friends who emailed me about bandwidth. The HR Capitalist is an equal opportunity blogger.
Still, just to show I'm no stick in the mud, here's an unrelated, yet classic, clip from Caddyshack... After all, the foundation of the employer/employee relationship is trust.... View it responsibly!!
You know, I have the attention span of a flea. I admit, that as soon as a conference call begins, I'm surfing the web. It's the only thing that can keep from actually hanging up on people.
Knowing this about me, I also make sure that when I'm presenting via webex I try to make it interesting enough to get other people to stop surfing.
Posted by: Evil HR Lady | March 09, 2008 at 04:00 PM