Comments on: Employees to be billed for personal Net use?

Surfers who abuse their privileges "could be issued...a 'please explain' and a bill," suggests an exec at Exinda, a maker of monitoring tools.

[Razzl]

Scroogeware...

I remember a study done in Britain in the late 70's showing that in offices where the staff were allowed to do the minor naughty stuff such as personal photocopying or phone calling and steal pencils from the supply closet, morale was highest and people were most productive. Web use is part of that package today. It's human nature to make use of what you have at hand and give yourself a breather at the office with these little diversions. Given the large percentage of web commerce that originates from office computers it may also be suicidal for certain businesses to encourage clamping down on web use. This software is the modern equivalent of the pay toilet...

[zizzybaloobah]

Why stop at bandwith?

Charge employees for the electricity (and lightbulbs) used when reading newspapers on the job, for the water they use in their personal coffee makers, and for the paper towels they use to clean their eyeglasses, etc. etc.

[mcugaedu]

Only for special cases...

If I were an employer, I might well want to have this capability, but I'd use it only in severe cases. I'm thinking of people who are collecting movies on a grand scale or are addicted to pornography or gambling. Just a few of those can really interfere with everyone else's network bandwidth.

It would be foolish to charge people for taking a quick look at CNN News or (shudder!) even CNET, or even "researching personal interests" in moderation. We want employees to have active minds.

On the other hand, this might be yet another tool to detect spyware, too.

jeez.

Man.. you'd have to have some real motherf*ckers in charge at your
company for them to install this program.

When you are slave to stockholders...

...as every public company is, you must generate growth all the time or else. You must increase your profit all the time or else. This means you must cut costs or else. And in the end this means being stingy to employees. Publicly-traded corporations suck, I've been in two of them.
I come to work every day knowing the stockholder is more important than any of the employees who put their time and effort into the work.
Yes, it is true- the little extra expenditures and allowances for employees like internet access and plastic utensils and paper plates and other things play an essential role in employee morale. But to the publicly-traded company, these are just additional barriers to stockholder satisfaction.