SHOULD EMPLOYER MONITOR EMPLOYEE'S INTERNET USAGE?

Earleir, it was the practice that

those at the top management level

only were provided access to internet.

Others had to use INTRANET for

transactions within and between staff of

other branches of the company and limited

access to other company's web sites.

The reason was that, in spite of having best firewalls,

the local servers are succeptible to virus attacks

and likely to hang or breakd down every other day

if open for everyone to have global internet access.

Also there were rules that juniors mark copy to

the manager concerned for all e-mail emnating from them.

In matters of importance the e-mails were allowed to go

only after the draft is seen and approved by the manager.

Also it was the practice that business matter is prepared

in a formal/official format which is then send attached

instead of simply putting these, wording and phrasing

in a casual manner in the text part of the mails.

A copy of these are saved in related folders both in

digital form as well as in hard copies, for future

reference.

It should not happen that earlier correspondences are

missing when an employee leaves the company.

Important messages are sent encrypted only by the

top managers who are authorised to have the encryption

code.

For lower staff, no recordable drives are provided to

safeguard against pilfering of information.

Only common printers and FAX machines that can store copy

of printed data are allowed to be used by the junior staff.

From what we hear nowadays in the media etc., it appears,

that no such practices are being followed even in the

topmost offices of the country, leave alone other ones.  

Its necessary to keep monitoring on a selective basis as business information can be leaked through email; secondly there are also instances where the individuals spend more time on unproductive internet usage. Left unchecked, the company could be in for suprise.