Preventive medicine
Obviously, monitoring employees is not meant to trigger mass firings. It's meant to prevent bad behaviour.
"A compliance and ethics program does not need to be expensive. It's not the dollars you spend, it's the management commitment," says Murphy of Compliance Systems Legal Group. He suggests using a simple video explaining company policy. "However, merely having a policy will not hold up if you don't enforce it."
Demonstrating that the monitoring software really works, communicating a clear policy about acceptable online behavior, and enforcing it are all necessary steps.
So is informing your workforce that they're being watched. "To be covert about monitoring really doesn't promote an air of security. If it's found outâ€"and it will beâ€"I think that there will be a huge backlash," says Sullivan.
Companies are worse off when they monitor employees but fail to enforce policies about illegal or offensive behaviour. In a lawsuit, you have no defense. "If it's found that you collected this information and did nothing, you really put your company in more hot water than if you turned a blind eye," Sullivan says.
When Randy Dickson, a systems analyst for the Connecticut-based multimedia production firm Sonalysts, revealed at the company's 2001 annual meeting that employee Internet use had been monitored using eSniff, the reaction was surprisingly positive. "There was some shock value, but most of the folks were happy to see it because we're an employee-owned business. If something is going to distress the company financially, they want to see it dealt with in a logical manner," he says. Dickson was pleased to find there was less abuse going on than he thought.
For instance, Dickson had been concerned about time wasted using instant messaging, but found that most of the IM activity was for legitimate business use and was actually saving the company money on phone bills. He also found system abuse that was caused by simple ignorance and easily corrected.
"One guy was playing Internet radio all the time. He assumed the service was free, but it was eating up bandwidth and we pay for our T1 line based on use," Dickson explains. Once informed, the employee stopped using the service.
"That's one of the virtues of eSniff," says Dickson. "When we first started the monitoring, people hadn't quite gotten the message about acceptable use. Since telling them about eSniff, though, it's gotten much easier."
