Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Employee Staff Personal Use of Office Computers Facebook Cell Phones

I went to a practice management seminar this past weekend and this was a hot topic.

I have relied on common sense and let employees self regulate on this but things have gotten out of hand.

Today, one employee stops the office workflow during the morning busy time to announce that "Jackie Chan" has died by falling 12 stories while filming a movie. This turns out to be a urban legend (It's even on snopes).

I was curious as to what your approach to this problem is. I am thinking there must be some middle ground.

Some suggestions by the attendees of the seminar were:
1) Keep cell phones in silent/vibrate mode
2) only take personal calls in the kitchen
3) do not use office computers for social media
4) some said ok to use office computers for personal uses at lunch and breaks
5) ok to use personal cell phones for internet, but not through the office wifi, and take it to the kitchen for use during breaks / lunch

I plan to update and enforce our dusty office policy on this and talk with the staff about it. I realize there are software solutions too (for example, I use openDNS for DNS and can easily filter out social media sites if needed).

suggestions?

We don't do any blocking, but there are only 4 employees, so it's easy to monitor. We let them use social media at lunch and don't have a policy on cell phone usage. There was 1 person who was fired for, among other things, browsing and texting too much. (She was warned beforehand.) Oh, the office has wifi but the employees cannot access it on their phones. One has asked for it before but I think it will encourage too much browsing/fb on their phones.

I think we're lucky that we've finally found good people that don't try to slack off too much. It really makes my job easier.

We have always had a strict policy about not using the office internet for personal use among the staff. I am thankful my receptions is very good, and always asks even for little things like running a personal copy, sending a personal fax, or checking the internet at lunch. My nurse has had an issue with the cell phone ringing loudly at her desk while rooming a patient, but a couple episodes of tossing the thing into the freezer solved that.

We allow the staff to use FB during lunch. We use Browse Control, which is awesome website filtering. We allow them to go only to sites we choose so you don't have to keep checking sites and adding.

Cellphones vibrate. The doctor next door puts all the cell phones in the breakroom. It doesn't cause loss of productivity, but it does look bad when they are texting.

I let them use email all they want. They are not allowed to use webmail -- have to use Outlook. I encourage emails as they tend to help during lawsuits, etc.

They won't police themselves.

Constant and inappropriate internet usage aren't the only issues which affects the productivity of employees. The employees may even slow down their pace of work simply because they no longer find the work interesting. This is why it is important to have an employee monitoring and engagement software which can help you in finding the slacking and the good employees. Try to understand as to why they are losing interest and see if it is possible for you to do something about it. Added to this, the software can also take care of attendance tracking and many other functions

Prohance,

Thanks for the good information. However, you should post in the Vendor section of the board.