As medical practices become more advanced, staff members are starting to gain better access to the Internet during work. Cyber-slacking is a well-known problem in the corporate sphere: one study found that over thirty-five percent of employees admitted that they used the Internet for personal surfing during work hours. The New York Times cited that twenty-five percent of Net use on work computers isn’t actually related to the work at hand. Although it is not known how severe the problem is in the medical field, the trend continues to grow.
Beyond the basic loss of productivity, there are other dangers resulting from employee use of the Internet during work. At one company a staff person was fired for visiting adult websites, then downloading and distributing the content to harass co-workers. Even if your employees do use the Internet in a decent way, when they download personal data onto a work computer they can create costs for your practice in terms of bandwidth and storage, or increased security risks.
So what can you do about it? For a start, you can create clear policies for use of the work network. Does your company have a well understood policy regarding Internet use, e-mail, and work computers? These sorts of policies should be included in the employee manual at the very least. In the majority of cases, clear policies for proper use do much to ensure proper behavior by your employees. These same policies are great protection for your practice in the instance of a lawsuit. Understand privacy laws, which are normally found under the jurisdiction of state laws. Laws vary by each individual state.
You should understand your rights and limitations as an employer. If you have doubts about a particular issue, contact a lawyer who specializes in employment law. In general, all the computers that staff use, along with the content, are property of the company. In the case of legal issues, as in allegations of harassment or discrimination, e-mail correspondence can be subpoenaed.
Make sure you understand your options before deciding to monitor use of the Internet. It could be a good idea to use software to monitor, but this depends on the size of your practice. Keep in mind that monitoring will add complexity and cost. Although there are free software solutions available to monitor the network, operation and installation costs could make monitoring more difficult than it is worth.
Also, you may consider that some personal use is a sort of work benefit which allows full-time staff to maintain other areas of their life from the workplace. In any case, if an employee is able to get their work done well and on-time, perhaps a policy of personal use which is too strict can be a detractor from their happiness in their job.
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