THE Internet has enabled companies to drastically improve the way they do business. It facilitates communication, gives employees greater flexibility and provides savings in time and resources. With more and more organizations being connected to the Internet, an emerging issue is managing how their employees use the Internet .

Ateneo Center for Organization Research and Development in partnership with the Open Net Initiative-Asia project surveyed 1,033 employees from 83 companies from all over the Philippines. The survey examined employees? Internet use and their attitudes toward Internet monitoring and censorship.

Internet use at work and at home

Nine of 10 respondents said that they use the Internet at work. More than half spend at least two hours on the Internet while at work for e-mail, searching for information and e-learning.

Results also show that most employees ?cyberloaf? or use the Internet for non-work related activities at least once a day. However, 80 percent also report using the Internet for work-related matters at home.

Monitoring

Two-thirds of respondents were aware that their companies monitor their Internet use. In addition, 75 percent of the respondents reported that their company has an existing IT policy.

The policy typically includes what Internet sites are off-limit, what they can or cannot do online, the type of information and files they cannot disseminate or download. The survey showed that employees are more open when their company tracks their activities compared to actually looking at the content of what they are doing.

Violations and sanctions

Respondents think that employee violations merit disciplinary measure but not necessarily dismissal. They report that sanctions for violations usually start with a warning and a public reprimand sent via e-mail to everyone in the company. However, there was no consistency across companies on to the type of sanction.

For example, sanctions for visiting pornographic websites ranged from termination, suspension, verbal reprimands or removal of Internet access.

Given the results of the survey, what can Philippine organizations do to ensure responsible use of the Internet?

Ensure a technology use policy. Around 25 percent of employees reported having either no IT policy at all or don?t know whether or not they have an IT policy in their company. This highlights the fact that there are still organizations without policies on Internet use. On the other hand, it is also a possibility that there may be IT policies and monitoring mechanisms in place, but these are not effectively communicated to employees.

Balancing rights of employees and companies. Because Internet abuse is a reality, it is understandable that more and more companies are monitoring Internet use. The key, however, would be to strike a balance between the rights of employees to privacy versus the right of employers to secure information resources. This requires developing and disseminating monitoring guidelines and protocols.

Educate employees. The study suggests that at most companies only provide employees with the policy with no discussion on it. Companies should educate their employees on the ethical use and possible repercussion of business intelligence. For example, employees should be educated on how information in blogs and social networking sites can be used against the employee and even the organization.

Manage leaders? expectation. In the study, 8 out of 10 employees will most likely connect to the Internet to do work-related matters once they get home from work. A possible reason would be that the supervisors of the employees may be requesting them to do additional work and send the output via e-mail.

Organization and leaders must then be able to manage their expectations of their employees because of possible repercussions of these on employee burnout, work-life conflict and turnover.

Productive use

Technology is a given in today?s work organization and more and more employees will be using the Internet.

The results suggest that there is need for organizations to manage and assist employees to ensure productive use.

It is important for organizations to lay down and implement policies on Internet use as well as train and educate both their leaders and workers in order to fully harness the benefits of technology.

(Olpoc and Hechanova are faculty members of the Ateneo de Manila University while Alampay is a faculty member of the National College of Public Administration and Governance, University of the Philippines, Diliman. This article is an abridged version of a study featured in the Ateneo CORD Trendwatcher monograph, Technology in the Workplace (2009). For feedback or inquiries please email ateneocord@admu.edu.ph.)