WEB SURFING IS COSTING YOU $$$$$

Web surfing during work hours is costing you thousands of dollars!

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The majority of managers and owners don’t put as much emphasis on Website content filtering as they should.  I have worked on thousands of small business owner’s computer networks in South Texas and discovered that 8 out of 10 business owners feel monitoring employee web surfing is a small issue in their daily operations.  Consequently, they find web content filtering unnecessary and sometimes harsh or too strict.  When I ask these business owners, “What if you knew your company information or a company process was leaking and losing you thousands of dollars?  You’d jump on this and fix at once, wouldn't you?”

Work time is Work time – That’s the same choice you need to make when it comes to filtering web surfing.  Web surfing at work is costing you money and compounding your work flow inefficiencies.

My employees would never do such a thing - Most business owners would be shocked at how much time their employees spend internet surfing.  They become dumbfounded when they compute how many dollars are wasted on pure internet surfing during work hours.  Without an Internet content filtering device, you are allowing your employees to waste time surfing for things that has nothing to do with business.   The problem is most business owners don’t think 15-30 minutes of web surfing as wasted man hours.

Fortune 500 companies spend millions on ways to eliminate inefficiencies just to recoup 15-30 minutes of a work day.  Work time equals money and isn’t the reason you are in business, to make money?

How much time?

·         30 – 40% of Internet use in the workplace is not related to business (IDC Research)

·         Over 60% of all online purchases are made between 9AM and 5PM (Nielsens/NetRatings)

·         70% of all Internet porn traffic occurs during the 9-5 workday (SexTracker)

·         37% of workers say they surf the Web constantly while at work (Vault.com)

These are independent statistics, and they show that employees are spending a large amount of time looking at things on the Internet that they shouldn’t be.

Let’s say you have three employees, who earn an average of $20 per hour and work an 8-hour day Monday through Friday.  Let’s assume that, with a website content filtering device in place, you recover just 15 minutes of productive time a day from each employee.  Just 15 minutes a day each.  This is actually much less than one percent of a 40-hour work week. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? However, you just regained $300 in labor costs per month–you just saved $300 per month from being wasted! That’s $3,600 a year–compare that to the cost of a decent Web Filtering Hardware device installed at your business, and this is only one area in which a web filtering device saves you money!

The US in a recession? Online Gaming climbing at the Workplace.

Most business owners and managers think with tuff economic times and so little jobs available that most employees would most likely stay away from online gambling.  Sadly, the truth is despite of all the layoffs, online gambling is up and more prevalent at the workplace.  Most online gambling occurs during normal working business hours which I personally have seen numerous times throughout South Texas.

We recently picked up client who suspected his employees were goofing off (internet surfing) during normal working hours.  After some consultation discussions on how best to proceed, we installed a Web Filter device attached to their network to monitor activity.  After 3 weeks of web monitoring the results came back and the owner was beyond shocked.  His employees would spend on average, 2.27 hours on internet surfing and online gambling throughout an 8 hour work shift. 

Good old PORN wins every time!

Nevertheless, it might be hard to believe but the most common form of employee misuse of the Internet is to surf porn.  Throughout my job experiences over the years, porn is the leader in internet misuse.  From professors, bankers, white and blue collar staff, including your eager beaver 10 year old kid, porn is just too easy to find without some time of Web Filtering Device in place.  And for all business owners who are naive and think it’s only men who watch porn during working hours….you would be gravely mistaken.

Quick Fact- Did you know a co-worker seeing porn on another employees screen and becoming offended can result in legal action against the company?  You don’t have to be imaginative to consider the costs of such a lawsuit.

Why is our network slow?

On a regular basis we hear the complaints on why the network needs to be upgraded.  One complaint is usually that their infrastructure is outdated.  That’s an expensive assumption though and quite possibly incorrect.  In most cases we found that all that was needed was a set of tools to manage bandwidth usage. 

Quick Fact - “Almost 40% of enterprise network bandwidth is being consumed by recreational or non-business applications.”

Some employees download intensive content like music videos, streaming media and advertising banners that clog up network resources.  With a good Web Filtering device in place, you can quickly and easily identify bandwidth tie-ups and avoid network congestion.  You can see which computer is downloading the media, and then stop it by throttling the bandwidth just like you use the gas pedal on your car to speed up or slow down.  You can set a limit to the volume of bandwidth that an individual computer is allowed to download which keeps your network resources freed up for important work.

Monitoring your employees internet surfing is a tedious and cumbersome task.  As a business owner, I completely understand since we monitor our employee’s internet surfing too.  But because we feel it can be also used as a reward we do allow full access to the internet during certain parts of the day.  In the end, to get the most out of your workforce I encourage all companies whether you have 2 or 100 employees and invest in some type of internet filtering device not only to protect your business but to protect your employees from themselves.  Remove temptation and regain your work time, after all it’s your business.

Christopher Tagle is owner of TagleRock Technologies, LLC a computer IT outsourcing firm located in Mission with over 2000 clients around South Texas.  Visit them online at www.taglerock.com or via email info@taglerock.com