By Tech Experts Staff
With today’s tight budgets every business is making cuts in some fashion. One interesting fact is that, in the United States, businesses waste some $760 billion every year on unproductive payroll.
If companies could find a way to cut back on this waste, then they would not need to cut as much elsewhere.
What do employees do to waste almost a trillion dollars a year? According to numerous studies, employees waste an average of just over two hours per day on unproductive or non-work related activities.
If you take that average and multiply it across your workforce, how much money could you be saving if you knew how? Fortunately we can help!
Internet Abuse Costly
While we don’t have a way to solve all of your company’s time wasting issues, we do have several solutions for the number one time waster by employees: Internet abuse.
Internet usage is the cause of nearly 50% of wasted time in the workplace! That adds up to 364 hours of wasted time per employee per year.
This is an incredibly easy fix, technically, and there are numerous prevention measures you can implement.
Acceptable Use Policy
The first prevention measure to help to prevent misuse of company time: Let your employees know what is – and is not – acceptable on your company network.
While most employees know that being online and goofing off is not right, if they haven’t been told they tend to not think twice. Implement a comprehensive acceptable use policy in your employee handbook.
Employees should be told what is acceptable and what consequences are in place should the acceptable use policy be breached.
Implement Filtering
The second way to keep employees from misusing the company network is to have proper measures in place to prevent unauthoroized use.
Most higher end routers have the ability to add websites to a filter and block them. This is a great way to prevent employees from having access to unauthorized or unnecessary websites.
If you don’t mind employees having access to websites such as Facebook during certain hours of the day, say lunch for example, then a policy can be put in place to allow access to these websites only during the specified hours.
While we don’t recommend access to websites such as Facebook on company networks, due to the possibility of easily accessing infected websites, ads, or popups, there are some companies that allow this.
Some companies have smaller networks where it is harder to justify the cost of a high end router, but still want to be able to control their employee’s network use.
For companies like this, there are other options. For example, there are some DNS providers that specialize in blocking non-work access. You simply point your router to the service to block the websites you don’t want employees to have access to.
One other option for those on a tight budget is to manually block websites by turning on the content advisor within each computers Internet settings and allowing only those specific sites an employee needs to complete their work.
Monitor Compliance
The final step is to have some sort of monitoring system in place and let your employees know it is being checked. Letting your employees know their usage is being tracked and monitored is generally an effective deterrent.
There are many different monitoring systems that can be installed on a user’s workstation and that run silently in the background. These systems can monitor everything on a user’s computers from keystrokes to taking screen shots of a user’s computer.
If you would like to speak with us on steps to improve your businesses productivity and cut down on wasted time give us a call. No matter what the size of your business, there are steps that can be put in place to help combat this rampant problem.