Are you abusing the Net?

According to this year’s People and Technology survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, more employees may be getting into trouble for email abuse at work.

Among its findings:

• 64% of the organisations which took part reported problems associated with staff use of email and Internet during the last 2 years.



• Nearly half of the 356 companies surveyed had reprimanded staff for excessive email use.



• A quarter had given staff a telling off for sending inappropriate attachments by email.

That said, bosses also seem to be starting to adopt a softer line on discipline. Companies seem to prefer to have a quiet word, rather than gunning for dismissal or any formal disciplinary approach. And over half the companies took no action at all on some occasions.

This more relaxed approach to the use of internet facilities may be due to the fact that more companies (92%) have a policy specifically for email and Internet use. This means that staff are aware of what they can and cannot do, and what’s expected of them. 59% of the respondents to the survey limit IT use to work purposes. The tendency is to keep warnings and dismissals for serious breaches of a potentially criminal or offensive nature.

The DTI’s Information Security Breaches Survey 2004, undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers, showed that the number of businesses where staff misuse the internet has doubled in two years. On average, companies reported one such incident every week; most of these were associated with web browsing. Although financial loss was rare as a result of such misuse, the time taken to investigate these incidents was typically a week.

In an article ‘Peer Pressure’, People Magazine report that implications for internet use go further than employees think. The software supplier Websense calculates that 75% of the 8 million people who say they download music from the web - do it at work. This can cause problems in several respects:

1. It may mean the employee is doing it in work time, i.e. not in lunch breaks;



2. A lot of downloaded music may be from sites which don’t comply with copyright laws.



3. The computer application used to access the files to download, called peer-to-peer file sharing, connects individual users’ hard drives across the web, thus exposing organisations to viruses, worms, and spyware.

According to People Management, Geoff Haggart, Vice-President, Europe, Middle East and Africa, of Websense, suspects that many companies are unaware staff downloading music could be endangering corporate networks. He says: “Nowadays there are far more technical challenges that HR needs to understand…IT departments haven’t been good enough at understanding the other things they should be advising HR on.”

The message is that IT and HR departments need to work closely together so that they each understand the true implications for email and Internet abuse; and that employers set out clearly understood policies for employees to adhere to.