November 7, 2008

HR Fact Friday: What and How Employers Monitor

Filed under: Communication — Tags: , , , , — Paul @ 3:18 pm

In a 2007 survey of 304 employers:

65% use software to block connections to innappropriate web sites, up from 27% in 2001.

96% block access to adult sites, 61% to game sites, 50% to social networking sites, 40% to entertainment sites, 27% to shopping and auction sites, and 21% to sports sites.

18% use URL blocks to stop employees from visiting external blogs (hopefully not our HR News & Views blog).

45% track content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard.

43% store and review computer files.

12% monitor the blogosphere to see what is being written about the company; 10% monitor social networking sites.

43% monitor e-mail, 73% of them use technology tools to automatically monitor e-mail, and 40% assign an individual to manually review e-mail.

Source: 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey, co-sponsored by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute.

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May 9, 2008

HR Fact Friday: Who Is Reading Your E-mail?

Filed under: Communication — Tags: , , — Paul @ 7:32 am

Is all this hub-bub about employer e-mail monitoring and rampant employee abuse of workplace email and high-speed Internet connections based on fact or just Big Brother ‘scare tactics’ to keep employee noses to the grindstone and hock Internet and e-mail monitoring software? Regardless of where you stand on this point, if you don’t have a company e-mail and computer/network use policy in place, and communicated to your employees, you really do have your head in the sand. Consider these statistics:

Almost one-third of companies said they’ve fired an employee in the last 12 months for violating e-mail policies, and 52% of the companies said they have disciplined an employee for violating e-mail rules in the past year (Seattle Times, 7/2006 survey)

(more…)

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