Before pointing fingers, a smart manager should make sure their argument is valid -- then figure out a way to enforce the policy Dear Bob …Quite a few members of my team are driving me around the bend. I need you to help me find the magic words that will turn the situation around.[ Also on InfoWorld, Bob offers counsel on how to treat employees — and account for their habits — fairly | Get sage IT career advice from Bob Lewis’ Advice Line newsletter. ] I manage a nine-person team of developers. We handle all development, enhancement, and maintenance of a major legacy application in our company.The problem? They spend most of their day ear-budded to their PCs, listening to Napster while they’re coding.I feel like a parent trying to keep a teenage offspring from multitasking while doing homework. You know the arguments — the music helps them focus on their code, keeps outside noises from distracting them, and so on. Then I do what parents sometimes do — fall back on authority. Parents say it’s the house rules. I explain that it violates company policy, could introduce malware, and eats bandwidth.To which they respond that the company policy is ridiculous; Napster is a reputable site that doesn’t introduce malware, and music doesn’t use enough bandwidth to have much of an impact — and they show me their calculations to prove it.What can I say that will turn this situation around? – Barely managing Dear Barely … Uh, why is it you want them to stop listening? Nowhere in your question do you suggest your team isn’t producing. You can’t counter their evidence and logic, which is often a sign that their logic is sound.And I don’t think listening to music while coding constitutes multitasking, but then, it might be because I’m listening to Napster as I write this (“Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, if you’re curious).I’d say your big problem now is that you made an issue of it and failed to enforce the work direction you tried to give. So now you have to find a way to reverse course without losing respect and authority. Here’s what I suggest: In the next staff meeting, let everyone know that listening to Napster is a violation of company policy. You didn’t write the policy. You aren’t going to discuss whether the policy makes sense or not, because once you go down that rabbit hole you could spend the rest of your life evaluating every policy in the policy manual, one at a time, deciding whether you agree with each one on a case-by-case basis.Which would be a pointless waste of your time and theirs, because your agreement or theirs doesn’t change anything — it’s still the policy.So from here on in, if they want to listen to music, they’ll have to use their personal MP3 players for that purpose. So long as they continue to perform, you won’t worry about that. But as a manager, if you know they’re violating policy and don’t do anything about it, your neck is on the line too, and you aren’t willing to risk it for anything as trivial as the “right” to listen to Napster on a company PC. If they want you to stick your neck out for them, they’ll have to come up with an issue that’s more important than that.I’d think that if you have any rapport at all with the team, they’ll understand your position and accept the compromise.– Bob This story, “What to do when employees waste time online,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Careers