I agree if employees are actually abusing the system, they need to be cut off. Not every employee needs Facebook or LinkedIn to perform their job functions during the day. Mostly, proper EDUCATION and TRAINING are lacking. I’m not suggesting putting up a PowerPoint ‘training session’ on the company’s SharePoint site – it never works. Assuming employees understand the risks of watching YouTube during company time jut because they clicked through a mandatory presentation doesn’t work. On an individual level, a good number of employees could CARE LESS about how their actions affect the infrastructure or other people’s productivity. I know this from experience, I’ve been at some of the Big Pharma and seen the (lack of) results from passive education. On the flip side, younger generations view unlimited access to the web as a *right* and as vital to their happiness and productivity as eating and breathing. Corporate culture, and how it’s managed, also go a far way into curbing slacker behaviors. When employees are unhappy or feel under-valued or under-appreciated (regardless of the bad economy or not) they have a strong sense of entitlement to ‘take’ from their employer – bandwidth and all.

My issue is – what about employees that have a real reason to reach out and interact with customers? Marketing departments need to publish content on a good number of these channels. Sales needs to know what consumers are asking for. I know it’s nearly impossible to block all unnecessary sites (MLB.com, for example, unless they happen to be a client…) but by prohibiting all access outside of email (we are seeing quite a few clients now that have this policy in place) it makes everyone’s jobs harder. What’s the best mix? It’s up to each company, but there will come a point where access needs to be granted to function in today’s social economy.

Employees are joining social networks such as facebook and LinkedIn and discussing company business – forgetting that the world is watching. Imagine an employee on LinkedIn making a claim about a company product/service that was never vetted by the sales and marketing team?

So yes.

“Information technology departments treat employees like teens that cannot be trusted with the Internet” because people do treat the company network like their personal home network.

NOTE: I am an Information Security Analyst for a large pharma in the Princeton area.
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