Higher employee productivity. A more comfortable work environment. Fewer concerns about sexual harassment claims. And reduced liability risk.
Those are all good reasons for employers to block questionable websites. Inappropriate images and reading materials can have devastating effects on the workplace in terms of morale, profitability and legal liability.
There’s even a more IT-centric reason to keep employees off those sites. They are bandwidth hogs. Unlike most websites employees visit during the day, which consist largely of text, destinations such as porn sites often involve video streaming at resolutions higher than a typical YouTube or Vimeo stream.
Here’s what that means in IT terms. Each month, the largest of these websites transfer a combined 29 petabytes of data. Let’s put that in perspective: That’s 29 million gigabytes. Presumably, most people are viewing that content from the privacy of their own homes. But studies have shown companies often don’t realize just how many of their employees are doing it during business hours.
Don’t know where to start? A good place to begin is by creating a workplace computer use policy. Make sure all employees understand it and then work with your IT specialist to block inappropriate sites. It’s one the best risk management moves a business can make.