Monitoring_Employees

Kahea Luces Friday May 21, 2010 Monitoring Employees on Networks The benefits of email in an organization are that it creates better client communications, improves productivity of employees by making communications quicker and easier, clearer, and prevents a loss of revenue for an organization by less spending on conventional mailing products and time used by employees to send mail. An organization might want to limit how an employees uses email during work hours to prevent lawsuits from someone outside the company and by not using emailing for personal use during business hours would bring up better productivity from the employee and no loss of revenue due to the personal time used by the employee to use email. Another disadvantage of using personal e-mail at work is that a company must retain all of its e-mail correspondence for a certain period of time or pay heavy fines. An emails path, after it leaves an organization, is usually meant to go to a certain person or persons, but can end up spread throughout the Internet by hackers. Instant messaging (IM) is most useful to a company because it offers real-time communication capabilities. It is also free, which saves the company money in communication costs. Another great advantage of instant message is it helps with grabbing the attention of users faster, it enables desktop sharing, and it helps with reducing email traffic. Instant messaging is a useful tool but, like e-mail, employees will use this tool for personal communications as well. It can also let confidential company information be released. IM’s open up unsecured channels for hackers and viruses to gain access to important information or even corrupt the pc altogether. Lastly, because the IM tools tend to operate below the acceptable levels of information security measures, it tends to expose an organization to regulatory compliance breach. The benefits of web pages and search engines are that an organization can put 
research into projects, create revenue with their own web page as an advertisement adding detail about the organization. Also, web pages and search engines are useful to a company because they give instant access to information about the organization. On the other hand a drawback would be that employees have access to misuse these search engines and web pages. Employees also contain the risk of picking up a virus, or access information that should not be handled at the workplace. Assisting in making the work environment free from hostile and harassing activity, I think that employers should monitor email and Internet usage. This will improve work environment and lower the exposure to employee lawsuits as monitoring assists in creating a safe and secure working environment. Employees will maintain an efficient and productive work habits. These improved work habits would boost efficiency, increase productivity and improve customer services. With the monitoring of the email and Internet usage, employers avoid misuse of the employer’s equipment and resources. Employers are being held legally liable for the atmosphere in the workplaces so to make sure that everything is law abiding, they need to keep tabs on their employers.