Employee productivity is determined by how efficiently work is being done. Productivity is determined by the amount of work produced over a period of time.
With the ever-changing advancements in technology from mobile devices to social media, it’s hard not to engage with it constantly, including in the workplace.
Take a look at these recent facts regarding employee productivity from Office Vibe and Forbes:
- $500 billion annually is lost due to employee disengagement/lack of productivity
- Social media tools & switching between applications accounts for 57% of the distractions at work
- 38% of workers waste at least an hour on social media while at work each day
- 50% of employees use the internet for an average of 3 hours a day for non-work activities
To ensure that your employees are being as productive and efficient as possible while securing your company’s financials, develop an Internet Content Filtering strategy.
With all of the operations that come with running a business, you don’t have the time to constantly look over your employees’ shoulders to monitor their activity. Internet Content Filtering allows you to monitor and control the websites your employees visit throughout the day. This allows you to be proactive by ensuring your staff won’t participate in non-work related activity, or more importantly, infect your computers with malware.
Here are a few processes and solutions to help your internet content filtering efforts:
First, implement an internet and phone usage policy.
Set clear expectations for personal usage on company computers. Make sure that each employee receives a hard copy of the policy and signs it to ensure they understand the expectations. Also, make sure they understand the consequences of inappropriate usage. Most importantly, find a balance in your policy to make sure it’s not too strict, as studies show this can have negative effects on productivity.
Since you cannot add a content filter to phone usage in the workplace, it’ll be much more of a challenge to monitor employee phone activity. However, a policy should still be put in place. Just as you wouldn’t allow long, personal calls during work hours, the same should go for internet browsing on phones.
Then, you can get an internet usage audit tool.
By having an internet usage audit tool, you’ll be able to receive reports if people are abusing the policy and also see how much you’re losing in productivity. Just be sure to let your employees know you have the right to audit their activity in your internet usage policy.
You can also install a business-grade firewall.
On a small scale, you can specify which websites to block. On a large scale, you can control downloads, which activities get the fastest internet speed, and which sites can run concurrently with work-related sites. There’s a nominal set-up fee and a subscription to come with firewalls, and it’s all worth it to improve your staff’s productivity.
Lastly, you can conduct security awareness training and a simulated phishing platform.
Your employees are easy targets of hacking through deceiving emails. OSG Phishing Services is the perfect solution for educating your employees on phishing and good security practices. With our help, you can now have access to a tool that allows you to better manage the urgent IT security problems of social engineering, spear phishing and ransomware attacks. You will also be able to train your employees and test their ability to avoid letting hackers in.
Employee productivity is essential to your company’s success. Though we don’t want to deter employees from feeling comfortable at work, we do want to ensure that you can provide your company with the tools to be as efficient as possible.
Learn more about our employee productivity services and get started with the right tools for your business.