where do employees go online?
May 24th, 2006
EMarketer reports on a study from Websense entitled Where Do Workers Go Online ? The study looks at where employees say they go vs. what the IT department says.
For example, 26 percent of employees say they visit job related sites while at work. However, the IT department says 44 percent have used the Web at work to search jobs. I suspect it would be much higher if the fear of getting caught wasn’t so prevelant.
May 24th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
It’s easy to assume that IT managers with access to access logs can report more accurately than users on their use of non-work-related web sites. The log doesn’t know users’ motivation, though, and the survey sponsor has an incentive to presume the worst.
Websense, of course, wants companies to decide that they really need web filtering. I won’t try to defend the sports or adult sites as work-related, but it is possible for some of the others to be work-related, at least some of the time. For example, business travellers could find work-related information on weather, maps and travel sites. Blogs–now there’s a broad category! Is Cheezhead work-related reading?
Hacking and keylogging sites sound like a security problem to me, probably something the end user doesn’t even know his computer is doing.
News, education, stocks/investing, government and more *could* be work-related. I encourage clients to use many of these sites as free information sources for market intelligence.I could go on. The point is that a simple compilation of sites visited tells you exactly that–sites visited. Determining what is work-related is a bit more complicated.
Which doesn’t even get into the blurring boundaries between work and personal life that don’t seem to bother companies when work seeps into personal time.