Are Your Employees Watching Porn At Work?

Here’s a statistic that’s going to shock business owners. We hope you’re sitting down for this because we were blown away when we first heard it. Did you know that 70 percent of all online porn access happens during business hours? What does this mean for your company?

One thing that we hope this doesn’t mean is that your employees are using their work-issued computers to access and look at online pornography while on the clock. This would be a deliberate waste of your company’s time and resources, and it’s definitely not what you’re paying them to do. In fact, a guilty employee may even be subject to termination and litigation, depending on how grievous their offense is.

Take for example one of the most extreme and bizarre cases of employee misconduct that we’ve heard of. In 2009, two janitors working for the state of New York were busted for turning an unused room on government property into what police referred to as a “man cave.” In it, they would spend their work days napping, doing and selling drugs, and watching pornography. To make matters worse, the duo was brazen enough to try and bill their man cave time as overtime, which totalled a whopping $28,400.

Egregious situations like this, along with even more-common occurrences like employees spending too much time watching YouTube videos, can be prevented with proper oversight. Does your company have a solution in place that will keep your workers honest? Whether you’re in the habit of walking around the office, looking over your team’s shoulders, or you have a firewall that monitors your employee’s Internet activity, you need to have some kind of deterrent in place that will discourage your staff from wasting company time and resources.

Now, we’re not saying that your employees are looking at porn every time you turn your back, or that they’ve converted your broom closet into a brothel. We’re just making the point that there are plenty of distractions on the Internet, and even honest, hardworking employees will benefit from having a technology in place that minimizes workplace distractions.

The kind of monitoring solution that your business needs is one that allows you to block all online distractions, like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, etc., and especially pornographic websites. In addition to adult websites being in bad taste for the workplace, they’re notorious for containing some of the worst viruses and malware, and hackers know how to use porn to bait users into clicking malicious links that give them access to your company’s network.

Does your network monitoring solution allow you to monitor what websites your employees visit? Or do you depend on the ol’ walk-around-the-office-and-peer-over-the-shoulder method? You can’t stand behind their backs all day, and this strategy doesn’t make for a healthy work environment. To protect your network and keep your team on task, you need a solution that’s proven to accomplish both of these goals in a proficient manner.

XFER’s Unified Threat Management security solution will let you specify who can access what on the Internet. Our solution encompasses a firewall, antivirus, spam protection, and content filtering to keep your employees productive, and your business safe.

If you want to learn more about how XFER can help protect your business, we encourage you to get in touch with us at 734-927-6666 / 800-GET-XFER.