HR must know when employee surveillance crosses the line: The debate over internet monitoring at work rages on, and HR not only must know the issues, but should be part of the decisions on whether to monitor

Workforce, Feb, 2002 by Eilene Zimmerman

Lazar advises his clients--which include Fortune 1000 companies in the financial services, high- and low-tech manufacturing, media and education industries--to use filtering or monitoring systems. Many do, largely to protect computer systems from viruses and junk e-mails, some of which could be offensive to certain employees, prompting hostile-work-environment lawsuits.

Employers also use monitoring to protect trade secrets and prevent other proprietary information from getting out. "Suppose you're a loyal employee in a chat room on the Internet and you see someone bashing the company's profits," Lazar notes. "The employee sends a message saying, 'No, you're wrong. In fact, we're about to announce our best quarter ever.' Well-intentioned sure, but what they did is illegal."

Nancy Flynn, founder of the ePolicy Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and author of The ePolicy Handbook (AMACOM, 2001), says a company can also set up its monitoring system to alert management to suspicious behavior. "If you find that someone who never works after 6 p.m. is suddenly showing up at the office in the middle of the night and going online, that should raise eyebrows. Why is this employee online? Is she downloading proprietary information?"

Even if employees aren't conversing in chat rooms, leaking trade secrets, or furtively looking at porn, they may be active recreational surfers, day traders, or radio listeners who are wasting a lot of company time and bandwidth.

Judi Epstein, product manager for iPrism, an Internet monitoring and blocking system from St. Bernard Software in San Diego, says her clients typically find that an employee goes online for business purposes and then gets unintentionally sidetracked, sometimes for a few hours. "At other times it is intentional," Epstein says. "At my last job, I worked with a woman who ran a side business on eBay Inc. while at the office--eight hours a day."

For all of the pros and cons, knowing what electronic monitoring systems cost and how much money they save is an obvious concern. But is it possible to figure out the ROI of monitoring software?

Vendors such as iPrism say yes. Companies uses gains in productivity to calculate the ROI, Epstein says. iPrism's software, for example, costs about $20 per employee per year, or about a nickel a day. Websense, a provider of Internet blocking and monitoring software located in San Diego, cites the same cost for its product. Vice president of marketing Andrew Meyer says the firm's research shows that the average employee spends about three hours a week on personal surfing. If monitoring helps cut that wasted time down to one hour, and the average employee earns about $20 per hour, the investment in Websense is paid back in a week.

Epstein is, of course, an advocate of monitoring. Still, she says the majority of workers who use the Internet are not overtly malicious, Most of iPrism's clients still allow their employees a lot of latitude in using the Internet, she says.

Even the most vociferous proponents of corporate snooping agree that the rules and morality now governing electronic monitoring are far from clear. Bruce Kasanoff, a former partner at marketing consultancy Peppers and Rogers Group and author of Making It Personal (Perseus, 2001), finds electronic monitoring frightening. His book discusses how technology enables companies to play Big Brother.