Some employees in Milam County, southeast of Temple, are abusing social media in the workplace.
There are 130 county employees in Milam County and most of them have access to a computer, but it's what those employees are doing with that access that has county officials concerned.
After several computers started crashing, an internet technician with the county realized there were 27 computers that had viruses. That's when the county officials had the technician installed employee monitoring software to monitor the county's Internet system and what he found out was completely unexpected.
"We did a study back in November, early December and learned that the average Milam County City employee was spending about five hours and 15 minutes of every work day on Facebook, not a good thing," said Frank Summers, Milam County Judge.
In fact, county workers spent more time on Facebook than they did working.
"The reality is we're here to work for the people and their taxpayer dollars are paying for this."
The data provided by employee monitoring software showed that for the week of December 9th, of the top ten visited sites, only one was work related. Instead some employees visited sites like eBay, Yahoo!, and Bestbuy.com during their work day.
Judge Summers told News Channel 25 there were no rules in place regarding social media before Monday. Now, the county commissioners have amended the rules and blocked certain sites using monitoring software.
"Pretty much, everybody, except a few law enforcement agencies working within the county have been locked down and can't get to Facebook," said Judge Summers.
The county's Internet technician director, Michael Brown, says agencies like the probation department, district attorney and the sheriff's office will all still have access to the site.
"Everybody else doesn't need it. It's just those specific few that actually do have a purpose for it," said Brown.
While Judge Summers says using employee monitoring software to take social networking sites away from employees wasn't something he wanted to do, he says action had to be taken.
"They need to be attending to county business and not to personal business."
The announcement was made during the county commissioners court on Monday, December 27th and Brown told News Channel 25 since they cleaned out the system and blocked the prohibited sites there have been no viruses.
Both the commissioners and Brown believe that both the employee monitoring software and the new Internet policy will help protect the network and encourage more productivity among the employees.
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