I was present at a CEO gathering in Toronto earlier this month and after the formal presentations in the afternoon that caused everyone to enter Stage I sleep, a bunch of us walked across the street to an Irish bar where we had a few and exchanged about current events - such as Komrade Duceppe tanking in the polls these days - but most importantly how we can enforce more control on our employees.
One topic that generated a lot of talk is why and how we should filter Internet access to prevent employees to loose precious billable time. 20 years ago it was difficult to squander a full hour by playing with an IBM Selectric unless you had ambitions to become the next Stephen King. But today anyone can log on to the network and spend half a day shopping for high-end speakers, learning about Lindsay Lohen latest arrest or inquiring about the psychiatric profile of your "friends" on Facebook. All of which cannot be billed to a customer and do not add to our profitable growth mission, therefore it serves no purpose.
As a result, organizations are relying on productivity-enhancement software such as WebSense and BlueCoat to restrain the human tendency to constantly procrastinate. If one cannot access his favorite fly-fishing Web site, then he might get back to work and actually deliver something. You'd guess only Gen Y slackers indulge on this, but it's not the case. Even boomers do it, they'd rather configure a Lexus on the Web than do real work.
The tricky part is determine what categories of sites are verbotten and which ones are suited for billable work. Some CEOs around the table obviously sporting liberal viewpoints favored an "open" environment where only hardcore stuff was filtered.
This is the kind of 2-edge sword that I don't want to bounce back. Being open is an invitation for total disaster, and being highly restrictive is just asking to be bugged 20 times a day with requests to "unlock" specific sites.
Me, I'm not too sure on what my position should be, and this uneasy feeling scares the beejesus out of me. I should be more assertive. My therapist says people gearing toward their late 50's & early 60's are more mellow, they're not trying to make a case of everything. I'm on mission to prove otherwise. Older Mike will be nastier than Youthful Mike. Yet, I have my share of doubts, but don't tell anyone.
Dear members, you input is appreciated nevertheless. Damn I hate to feel like this.
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