Achieving employee adulthood

Dear Bob …

Your recent columns about nailing down everyone’s computers at work got me thinking about something tangentially related: just how much do people goof off at work?

Apart from alleged security issues, of course, one of the reasons often given for (for example) not allowing users to install their own software is that, if we do, everyone will spend all day long on chat clients.  Opponents of this viewpoint tend to say things like, “We can’t expect our employees to behave like responsible adults if we treat them like irresponsible children.”  I freely admit that they’ve got a point, but even so…

I’ve been in only two companies thus far where my duties required me to review network usage for inappropriate activity, my current one being the second.  Not long ago, we took a sample of one days’ usage statistics and found that the top 15 sites visited accounted for about 97% of all site visits — and not a single one of them had to do with work (if I recall correctly, YouTube alone accounted for about one-fourth of all visits).

Is this the exception or the rule?  And if it’s the rule, doesn’t it kind of undermine the idea that management has to treat employees like adults to get them to behave as adults?

I’m just pondering this as I make plans for later in the day, after everyone has left, to go to the computer of a user who insisted she needed administrative privileges for her work, so I can uninstall Google Talk and demote her access privileges (a policy I have no role in creating but am responsible for enforcing).

– Feeling parental

Dear Concerned Parent …

But what percentage of the workday did visiting those sites represent?

Your letter raises some serious and valid issues. And I have no doubt at all that treating employees as adults is merely a necessary condition for their behaving that way, not a sufficient one. Among the others is making the expectation clear.

Then there’s structuring the work and communications so employees recognize how they contribute to the company’s overall success, and making them feel like they have a stake in the success.

Sometimes managers also have to recognize when they have an employee who isn’t capable of adulthood, and replacing him or her with a different employee who is. Failing to do so communicates very loudly that childish behavior is okay.

And there’s a last piece: Many employers encroach heavily on personal time, requiring many more than 40 hours and five days per week of work. Those who do have an ethical obligation (in my view) to allow those employees to spend a modest amount of time on personal business during work hours.

– Bob