Internet @ work.

I was reading an article the other day stating that most people spend over 25 per cent of their time online at work on personal activities, The most common online activities include online trading sites, instant messaging/chat services and peer-to-peer sharing sites (allowing movie, music and software sharing) and of course personal e-mails (80 per cent of emails sent by volume in the workplace are personal).

Some company directors and/or managers are often unaware what was happening on networks under their control, Then there are bosses that know what goes on and there attitude is a happy worker is a good worker, But then there are those bosses that just take and take from the workers and make assumptions that their staff are up to no good, because thats what they would do.

Is reading, writing and sending personal e-mails at work wasting company time? What about online banking? Is it more time efficient to let staff do their banking online than having them leave the office for half an hour?.What about illegal downloading?, Its the company (not the employee) that would face the legal implications if investigators tracked who was downloading movies and music, But im sure employers will get a lot tougher after the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act is brought in to force later this year. The act says that internet service providers should think about implementing a policy providing termination for customers who have not respected copyrighted material.

I guess it all comes down to how much the boss respects his or her workers because studies have shown that social networking can be an asset to a company.