PC World - Tasha 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 worker's compensation claims manager. Most of the personal e-mail messages were innocuous notes regarding birthday greetings and lunch plans with co-workers, she says. But none of this mattered to Newitt's employer, who examined her office's e-mail after a co-worker filed a sexual-harassment complaint against a supervisor. The department ultimately fired eight employees, including Newitt, and disciplined 16 others for their improper use of agency equipment.
Will Vehrs, who works at the Virginia Department of Business Assistance, received a 10-day unpaid suspension for excessive casual use of the Internet while at work. Vehrs' employer knew he blogged, often about state issues, at the Commonwealth Conservative's Virginia politics blog. In fact, Virginia's governor read and sometimes reused his posts; but he was punished after composing humorous captions for photographs as part of a local newspaper's contest. His captions poked fun at a Virginia county and annoyed a local politician.
Whether streaming video is eating into a company's network bandwidth or employees' viewing of adult content is exposing the firm to sexual harassment charges, companies have some legitimate reasons to limit their workers' access to and activity on the Internet.
A 2005 survey of 526 businesses and organizations by the ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association found that 76% of them monitor the sites that their employees visit, and 65% block certain sites. At least 55% of them review and retain employees' e-mail, and 36% track the content on workers' PCs, their keystrokes, and the time that they spend at the keyboard. Lost productivity is a major concern: Last spring, some companies blocked streaming video during the NCAA men's college basketball tournament. Even so, more than 14 million fans accessed video from the NCAA March Madness on Demand Web site during the first three rounds of the tournament, according to CBS SportsLine; and considering the starting times of the games, many of them likely did so from work
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