Who Is Watching You At Work?

Practically everycompany has some statement in their employment agreement or employee handbookabout acceptable Internet uses, and a few will even state that the companyreserves the right to review and inspect all e-mails and computer files. Butjust how invasive corporate monitoring and who?s monitoring computer activitiesmight surprise users. 

According to anew survey by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute,roughly one in four companies are actively monitoring employees? e-mail,computer files, Web surfing and physical movement in the workplace.

The most commonform of employee surveillance: Web surfing. According to the 2007 ElectronicMonitoring and Surveillance Survey, 66 percent of American companies monitorand review users on-the-job Internet activity. Of those companies, 63 percentare conducting monitoring on an ongoing or routine basis.

Company?s biggestconcerns when it comes to employee Web surfing: overwhelmingly adult andpornographic sites (96 percent). Gaming sites, such as online gambling and communalvideo games ranked second (61 percent). Surprisingly, social networking sitessuch as Facebook and MySpace ranked third (50 percent).

Corporatemanagement is concerned about legal liabilities and ramifications associatedwith adult Web sites and productivity losses from users spending too much timeon social networking, gaming and entertainment Web sites. Nearly two-thirds ofthe companies surveyed said they use Web filtering to block access to Web sitesprohibited by their company policy.

Monitoring ofcomputer usage is prevalent in many companies, including the use of keystrokeloggers and time trackers and content filters. Approximately 43 percent ofcompanies said they?re using some form of computer monitoring to measureemployee usage, of which 60 percent are conducting regular or activemonitoring. Another 43 percent inspect employee computer files for breaches ofconfidentiality, inappropriate material and policy violations.

Inappropriatee-mail use remains the most damning of employee Internet sins. Forty-threepercent of companies say that they monitor employee e-mail; of which 96 percentmonitor external e-mails and 58 percent monitor intra-company e-mail. 

Users stand anear equal chance of getting fired for either e-mail or Internet activityabuses. Twenty-eight percent of companies said they had fired an employee foran e-mail infraction; the most notable reasons: violating company policies (64percent) and using inappropriate language (62 percent). Thirty percent of thecompanies said they had fired someone for inappropriate Internet activity; thetop reasons: view, downloading or uploading offensive content (84 percent);violating company policy (48 percent) and excessive personal use (38 percent).

Surprisingly ishow companies are treating social and new media, such as sites like Facebookand independent blogs. About one in 10 companies are monitoring the blogosphereand social networking sites to see what?s being said about their business and18 percent block user access to external blogs.

Corporatesurveillance isn?t confined to computer use. Nearly half of companies saythey?re monitoring employee phone use, too, mostly time spent on the phone andnumbers dialed. Phone monitoring isn?t as invasive as computer monitoring, withonly 2 percent of companies recording employee phone conversations and 4percent reviewing voice mail files.

While 25 percentof companies surveyed use video surveillance to counter employee theft, only 7percent of companies use video cameras to monitor employee productivity ? andonly for select jobs.

So who?s doingall of this monitoring and surveillance? Three out of four times, it?s ITstaff. After that, human resources (34 percent), legal (18 percent), compliance(17 percent) and outside third parties (4 percent).

Only two states?Delaware and Connecticut?requirecompanies to inform employees of electronic monitoring, most companies reportthat they either tell employees that they could be monitored or actively informemployees when monitoring is happening.