Friday, May 16, 2008
Hide those dirty pictures, scratch the solitaire: Major companies are increasingly monitoring employee Web, e-mail and phone activity.
Aug 3, 2000 | In the interest of discouraging its employees from surfing porn and engaging in hot eBay action, Cabletron used to send out a monthly staff e-mail. The message? A list of the top Web sites each employee had visited, the sites they went to that included "no-no" keywords (sex, shopping, etc.) and their company ranking in terms of time spent online.
By embarrassing employees with a Web transgression "report card," the New Hampshire tech firm sent a stern Orwellian message: We know what you're doing. Though the much-despised monitoring program was abandoned last year by incoming CEO Piyush Patel -- "He made it very clear he trusts people to do their job," says Cabletron Internal Technology chief Bill Davis -- other companies have not been so trusting.
Big Brother -- in the form of your company's information technology (IT) department -- may be watching your Web tracks, or reading that e-mail you thought your trash had long since incinerated. According to the American Management Association (AMA), company snooping is rampant, with software such as MicroData's "Cameo" making it a snap for employers to pry as they see fit. For obvious reasons, most companies don't publicize their detective habits to employees, except in the form of vague memos warning that inappropriate equipment use won't be tolerated. But some firms are increasingly firing the violators.
Nearly three-fourths of the nation's largest corporations, from Xerox to Salomon Brothers Smith Barney, check up on employees by monitoring e-mail, Internet use, computer files and even telephone conversations, according to a study by the AMA, a nonprofit organization that provides management and business training.
Companies say they don't routinely (or randomly) spy on employees, but the AMA found that many would not hesitate to do so while conducting an investigation or a performance review. They're also willing to take quick action: 28 percent of the companies surveyed say they've already dismissed people for misusing office equipment.
Just last week, Dow Chemical Company fired 29 Michigan employees, suspended another 42 and disciplined many others for sending pornographic or "violent" images on company e-mail. After receiving an employee complaint, the firm spent a week scrounging through thousands of e-mail files. What turned up on Dow's servers were hardcore nudes and gory photos, including one of a motorcyclist who had been run over by a garbage truck. "There was a whole range of material, from mild pornographic pictures, to Sports Illustrated swimsuit photos, to hardcore and violent images," says Eric Grates, spokesman for Dow's Michigan headquarters. "The people involved crossed gender lines, and it wasn't just the hourly work force. From Dow's standpoint, it's very disappointing this happened."
The New York Times sifted through its employees e-mail late last year, and ended up booting 23 workers at its Virginia support offices for sending porn and dirty jokes. The investigation began after an employee used the company's letterhead to try to get benefits for a friend. Because the e-mail was improperly addressed, it bounced back to the company's server. A broader probe found several employees who had used the e-mail system improperly. "We had sent employees a copy of our e-mail policy, saying that reasonable personal use is OK as long as it's consistent with conventional ethical standards, but that sending offensive material is not," says Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for the company. "And in this case, it was very offensive material." Mathis, however, stressed that the company doesn't routinely monitor e-mail.
In yet another case last year, Edward Jones & Co., a St. Louis brokerage, got rid of 18 employees, warned 41 others and allowed another to resign, again for sending porn over the company's e-mail system. "We have 15,000 employees to protect, so we can't allow inappropriate behavior," says company spokeswoman Mary Beth Heying, adding that employees signed a document before they received Internet access, agreeing not to use the equipment for inappropriate purposes. "It all comes down to what employees do on the company's time."
Viewing pictures of naked people, or just musing about them, seems to be a major preoccupation for the modern worker. A survey last September by Vault.com, a New York human resources site, found that of the 1,244 who participated in a survey, nearly 60 percent said they had received sexually explicit or otherwise improper e-mail messages at work.
At present, companies that do the most screening tend to be larger firms with more resources. Smaller companies often can't afford to tie up their tech teams to act like detectives, and they run the risk of scaring off employees who might have chosen to work there because they prefer a "family-like" atmosphere, as opposed to an overly watchful corporate environment. (Salon.com, for instance, doesn't screen employee e-mail or Internet usage, although it has the technology to do so.)
One Salon IT member, however, recalls how at his last job, he was appointed by the chief information officer to investigate employees' Web surfing habits. "I was asked only a couple of times to log where the person was going on the Web. Both cases, I was told it wasn't where they surfed, just the amount of time they spent surfing," he says. "They said that they basically wanted to bolster their reason for firing them."
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