The company that I work for has just decided to block all staff access to social networking sites like Facebook. Here’s the important part of the note.
This week, we will be advising employees that from 15 October 2007, they will no longer be able to access social networking websites, such as Facebook, from their work computers. Any employee who has a valid business reason to access such sites needs to talk to their line manager and then contact their IT Service Desk to ensure they are not blocked. From 15 October, access will only be reinstated if there is a valid business case, backed by line managers.
Now I have no doubt that somewhere there’s a report which shows that X number of staff have spent Y amount of time on sites like Facebook in ‘work time’ and using work computers. Multiply X by Y and suddenly you’ve got a problem.
Maybe it happened something like this.
Manager 1 – ‘Hey we’re paying these people to work. Not to spend valuable time messing about on social sites’.
Manager 2 – ‘Yeah, we’ve gotta do something about this’. Can’t we just put a firewall in place and block access for everyone’.
Manager 1 – Yeah, that would do it. Let’s just stop them from being able to visit the site.
Manager 2 - OK, I’ll get right on it.
I’ll give the people involved (almost certainly more than two) credit for asking aloud the question of whether this was the right solution, and was it really wise to create such a sweeping decision. But the fact that they’ve decided that it is the right solution really worries me.
Now if you’re part of a brutal military regime or an unelected dictatorship such as exist in Burma, North Korea or China then such a policy can probably be justified. Hey, if I was a brutal dictator then I’d probably think that it made perfect sense to prevent the masses from having unrestricted access to the internet. Can’t have any of this free will nonsense getting in the way can we?
But in a UK based financial services company this type of approach feels a little heavy handed.
Here’s how I would deal with it.
Find out how many staff are spending how much time on Facebook.
Find out which members of staff are spending lots of time on Facebook. Now ‘lots of time’ is a bit vague – so use common sense. I’d probably go for something like anything over 30 minutes a day to begin with
Remind staff that the internet is made available to them as part of a suite of tools provided to help them do their jobs effectively.
Remind them that the right of access shouldn’t be abused – and that spending large amounts of time on social networking sites would count as abuse (unless of course their role is to trawl social networking sites in order to find out what’s being said about the company).
Contact anyone via email who has high usage of these sites and remind them of the policy in a more direct way. A kind of ‘hey we know what you’re doing, here’s the evidence. Now stop’.
Monitor their usage after this warning – along with everyone else’s. And if they don’t abuse it again then job done. If they do continue to abuse it then take appropriate disciplinary action ranging from removal of internet privileges through to dismissal, depending on the seriousness of the abuse.
What you shouldn’t do is tar everyone with the same brush and treat them like school kids who can’t be trusted. And ask them to provide a business case as to why they should be treated like adults.
