Personal Use of Workplace Computing Resources
Are your employees utilizing your resources to manage their personal life? As an employer myself it is important to allow employees the freedom and flexibility to extend their personal life into their work area, desk or shop space… however, with a few duly noted boundaries (stay tuned for this a near-term blog entry).
All too often we are asked by customers to lock out a freshly fired employee, track a specific user’s Internet usage or urgently change a user password. And, lets not forget the many times we have been requested to block Facebook, eBay and streaming music. All of these items, and your stance on them as an employer, should be clearly stated in your corporate computing use policy and distributed to ALL users. While it is not our intention to create a ‘big brother’ environment for employees, it is, however, our intention, as employers to respectfully deny use of resources which, ultimately, pay our employee wages.
In the end, your computing resources are the backbone of your business operations and the lifeline and mechanism for exchanging communication and revenue. Consider your employee’s personal life extension into the work place carefully.