Tag Archives: Internet use

Sunday morning at home

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Michele isn’t feeling well this a.m. so we won’t be going to church.  Keegan stayed overnight at a friend’s house to work on a big school project, so things around here are a bit more quiet than usual.  Today is my beautiful wife’s birthday! so that makes it an extra special day.

I’ve been watching a lot of football lately.  Keegan’s team plays every Friday night and sometimes on Saturday morning as well.  Unfortunately his team lost for the first time this past Friday, to Vernon Hills.  On Saturday his team played Vernon Hills again, and lost again, but it was great to watch the game because Keegan got to play for awhile and he got in at least one good tackle.  (The position he plays is defensive tackle.)  Yesterday afternoon while Michele and Brinley went to get groceries, I watched quite a bit of college football while Tristan and Cohen built a fort and played with knight costumes.  Those who know me well would understand how unusual it is for me to be watching football!  But you know what? I’m kinda getting into it.  I was thrilled that Illinois beat Penn State, but disappointed that Michigan State didn’t beat Wisconsin.

In other news, a good friend of mine lost her job Friday due at least in part to blogging at work.  She was apparently accused of writing negative things about her job and her co-workers, neither of which is true.  It really makes me wonder about the whole blogging at work thing.  Personally I do not have a problem with this at all, viewing it as something akin to using the telephone sometimes for a personal call, or writing a personal email while at work.  Of course, there is always the possibility for abuse, but then, there always has been.  By that I mean, the introduction of Internet access, blogs, or any other computer-related technology provided to staff did not usher in a new era of possibility for abuse or performance issues.  Think of the telephone.  Persons can abuse their telephone privileges as much or more than their Internet privileges, and the telephone predates computers and Internet access by a long shot.  What I’m trying to say is that there isn’t really anything new here, first of all; and second of all, abuse of work equipment — whether it is the telephone, the copier, or the company’s Internet access — is a performance issue.  If staff members aren’t getting work done in a reasonable amount of time, then their manager needs to look at how they are spending their time, including time spent talking on the telephone for personal reasons, or time spent browsing on the Internet, or time spent posting to a blog or commenting on other blogs.  And it is important to state that how they are spending their time in these ways is only part of the overall picture the manager needs to understand in order to figure out why staff members are not productive.  Put another way (and setting aside potential for really negative things, things that other staff might deem offensive), if my staff are getting their work done in a timely fashion or even ahead of schedule, I have no problem with them spending some work time doing personal stuff.  Folks, this is just common sense management practice.

It really galls me that so many corporations think they can truly control every aspect of what their employees do during a work day, particularly when it comes to computer and Internet use.  It galls me because as I’ve already tried to point out, this is a local, individual management issue.  But it galls me even more because work environments will never succeed in shutting down or blocking personal activity.  And I think it is extremely COUNTER productive for them to even try to do so.  This is particularly the case in this time of instant messaging, personal cell phones, email, blogs, and more.  I fully understand and support monitoring of personal activity when it becomes a performance issue, and the potential need for reprimands or other strictures for the few cases where this privilege is abused.  But even then, there needs to be a step by step process whereby a warning is issued and the staff member is given an opportunity to improve, followed by progressively stronger measures culminating, finally, with termination.

I don’t know the whole detail of my friend’s situation but I do know that her employer made claims about what she was doing and writing that were simply false, and it seems as if her dismissal came without prior warning.  This is the sign of extremely poor management.

Mixing work and blogging

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This article in the Chicago Tribune today was interesting to read, although it didn’t cover any new ground in the debate about employee blogging. Now that I work for a commercial entity again, this is an issue that I am more aware of. As far as I know there is no official blogging policy at my company, although a broader policy about Internet use could be construed to cover it. It is related to my previous post in that the author mentions the accessibility via Google and other search engines of whatever people choose to write in their blogs, and how easy it is to get into trouble if something negative is written about an employer. It also mentions that concerns by employers about their employees blogging are very similar to concerns employers had back when universal access to email and the World Wide Web for employees was a new thing.

I have had firsthand experience with this concern on the part of an employer. When I was at the University of Chicago I was asked to chair a task force in their library’s technical services division that was charged with articulating a set of guidelines for acceptable use of the Internet on the part of librarians and staff. The formulation of this task force was largely prompted by concern by some supervisors in technical services about abuse of Internet and email on the part of their staff. The task force duly arrived at a set of guidelines but frankly, they were not taken seriously and, at least for the duration of my time there, were not enforced that I know of. My personal view of the situation as a manager of several staff was (and still is) to rely upon principles of common sense and good supervision rather than an artificial set of rules or guidelines. I remember likening the potential for abuse of email to abuse of using the telephone. There is nothing new in this, really. And blogging is similar. If I as a supervisor have concrete, well understood expectations for performance by my employees, along with concrete ways of measuring that performance, the issue of email/blogging/telephone/Internet abuse can be easily dealt with. For instance, I made clear to my staff that I really didn’t care if they used the Internet for personal things IF (and that is an important point) their performance was good. That is, if they were getting their assigned work done in a superior fashion then using the Internet for surfing or writing emails or whatever was just fine with me. However, I also made it clear that if performance was subpar then personal use of the Internet would be one of the key areas I would focus on for that staff member, and I would restrict or curtail that activity if it was shown to be a contributing factor to their negative job performance. Unfortunately, my experience has shown that there are many supervisors in libraries (and maybe elsewhere) who lack common sense and/or people leadership skills and who turn to artificial rules and regulations to do their work for them.