Time out — illegal procedure

I met with a friend of mine today who is a HR guy at a major Fortune 100 company and he told me that his company is considering a plan to block its employees from using Facebook or Myspace at work. At first, I thought I misheard him. And then he continued by telling me that a recent survey of over 200 companies showed that 50% of businesses currently restrict employee web surfing with automated web filtering systems and that that most businesses expect this number to grow in 2008. Why are they doing this? Publicly, they say that they are worried about viruses, etc. But privately, they will admit that they are worried about their employees’ productivity. They also worry about their liability if an employees does something illegal from work. Man — what are these guys thinking? Talk about frustrating their employees and cutting 0ff their lifeline to new technologies — cutting off Gen Yers and others from the outside world. And what about the trust issue. I remember once sitting in a conference room with Intuit’s CEO, Steve Bennett, when someone asked him why would we ever want our employees posting on the web. His response was ‘hey, why would we hire someone we didn’t trust. Of course, we are going to trust them.’ Limiting someones web access at work is old school. Next thing you know, they will be having metal detectors at the front door and confiscating Blackberry’s, iPhones, and Palm Pilots. With any of those devices, I could go into an office (where no one can look over my shoulder or monitor my PC movements), log on to FaceBook and poke someone.