What Web Sites Do Employees Visit During Work: It Depends On Whom You Ask!
Do you wonder what percentage of people at work are visiting job search sites? How about “adult” websites? What other type of websites are most frequently visited by people at work?
Thanks to eMarketer.com, we have some answers to these questions.
Well, in part it depends on whom you ask: the employees (who may say what they think is the “right” answer)or the IT administrators ( who have seen the user history logs).
The results are rather interesting. It turns out that according to employees:
93% visited work-related sites while at work, the most frequently visited type of website.
Make sense? Sure! But if you check with the IT people, they say only 58% of users had work-related sites in their history list.
And the WEATHER is the most popular kind of website at work!
Could people be misreporting what sites they visit? Or do they forget?
What about “adult” websites? According to the employees, only 1% go to adult content websites. But, according to the IT people, 11% have such sites in their history list. Go figure!
Kind of similar results for doing job search while at work (imagine, the audacity!). Only 26% of employees say they have gone to such sites, while the IT people say it is 44%.
Go here to get more details on what websites people visit at work. Thank you, eMarketer!
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So what’s an employer to do with this knowledge?
Fire 44% of the workforce for thinking about quitting to take another job?
More seriously, an employer that has knowledge of adult site use should probably formally discipline all those involved, because it implicates potential sexual harassment charges.
And if some employees truly never use their Internet connection for work-related purposes, perhaps Internet should be disabled on their workstation, especially if the logs show the employees use the Internet a lot for non-work purposes.
This is a tough area because much of the non-work use, such as checking news or weather, may be innocent use of break time (official or unofficial) that does not interfere with completion of assigned work.
And cracking down too much may have negative morale consequences — almost half these people are already looking for other jobs — that may be aggravated by the perception that the employer is too Big Brother-ish.