The company I work for recently published a policy forbidding blogging while at work. From first glance this looks like a natural and normal thing – why should they provide resources to enable people to blog. Blog from home on your own time and with your own resources. At second glance this is a little scary for the paranoid blogger.Consider this scenario: You are a paid blogger who brings in maybe $100/month in advertising and paid post revenue. You use several automated systems as well as WordPress’s scheduled publishing to make it appear that your blog is updated much more frequently than it really is. For example, you pre-write an entire week worth of posts on Sunday from home. These posts go out at various times during the day including hours you are at work. Now your employer finds out that you have a blog and starts looking back through your blog noticing that you posted during work hours. Are you fired, in trouble? What kind of recourse do you have?
Say that you are able to talk your way out of it – they are being reasonable. Things go along just fine until one day you get an email during the work day with evidence that someone is trying to hack your site or has found a way to post spam in your comments. You log into your website to put up a “down” notice and take it offline until you get home. Your employer notices that you visited this same blog site that you claim to not work on during the day. Now you not only blog from work but you lied to them about not doing it.
In my case I see these and other problems. I may not have been updating the blog daily because work is requiring me to work the job of at least two people of my skill level, but if I suddenly do find the time to start doing this again (I’m trying) then I am at risk for these issues. Work does not have an issue with incidental use of the Internet for non-work purposes provided that I am not charging time to the company. They have similar policies with printers, faxes, and phones. The problem is now that they have singled out blogging as something specifically forbidden. Not blogging about the company, co-workers, inside information, etc, but just plain blogging in general.
I know what they are trying to protect themselves from, but it isn’t the average blogger. It is the rogue employee. So why make a blanket statement like this? Just so it is easier to dismiss an employee?
I will have to document when I make posts if I do time them to run during the day. I have always avoided looking at my website during the day and have never spent any company time blogging. To say I can’t blog is like saying I can’t write a letter to the newspaper while at work, can’t call a friend or family on the phone, and can’t use the fax machine- regardless of whether I’m charging time or not. Blogging (not this blog) is a way for people to communicate today just like phoning except that it can reach a wide audience. If I write on my personal blog (or twitter) that I’m going to be late today because I am working on a project then potentially everyone who is affected by that could be told instantly rather than me spending 20 minutes calling everyone on the phone.
Companies should have a right to keep their employees busy working on company business. They need to be much more specific as to what kind of behavior they are not allowing rather than just making a blanket statement such as “no blogging from work.”
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An interesting post. I think the company has to be direct and say exactly what they will and will not tolerate. Some companies have banned Facebook while others have not.
I have noticed that my company will block Gmail for a while and then unblock it. I have no idea why they do that, could be that to many people are browsing and so they try to bring it down a bit.
Yes, good point. We use Websense to block a lot of different sites. For a while they blocked many different webmail sites and then realized that more people use it for semi-legitimate reasons than not. They also don’t filter SSL traffic at all, so anything sent out port 443 gets no filtering, so GMail was always available if people were smart enough to do that.
I agree totally about the need to define what it is they accept and do not accept. We have people who browse the web from the moment they arrive in the morning until they leave in the evening. Sites that are totally not legitimate too. I know of a person who has a anime addiction who does this, and another who uses a certain forum all day long that is loosely related to our business (so it is allowed) but totally not for work reasons. When the anime user hit on some pornography it was investigated and reported, and a big deal was made about the time spent on the site, but the other guy has never had anything said to him. Both are in the same category, however, as being time wasters for the company.
Part of the problem with reporting is that people have different needs. For example, someone in IT can download gigs of data in a day, but it can be legitimate. Someone in purchasing can download MP3s or watch streaming video all day which would not. Someone else may decide to download a Linux distribution at work because the connection is faster than at home. Where do you draw the line?
Good thing my company hasn’t done this yet!
If the company did that, there might be a serious reason. I mean my company actually prohibits a lot of things but i still see colleagues using YM at work. I blog at home and no time at work for blogging or leisurely surfing…. but maybe a moderation would do? Maybe someone from your company really blog more than actually the worked hours????
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I’m sure that has happened. I know we have people who spend a high amount of time browsing sites that aren’t specifically related to their job. Then again I keep iGoogle open which refreshes regularly so I can keep an eye on my stock prices, email, etc. So if someone sees that I’m refreshing a page every few minutes it may look like I just sit at my desk looking at stocks all day when in reality I may look at it only occasionally.
Wow that’s unfortunate. I work in the Network administration area at my company and we have blocked things like facebook and myspace but not blogging. I guess there is a good reason for it though. I used to and still blog at work all the time during down time… which when you are staring at servers all day in a server farm there is a lot of down time haha. Hence why I focus on security… it gives me something to do! I still don’t see blogging as a security risk… they must have caught too many people blogging. I mean websense makes it so you can see everything so it must have been a huge time waster.
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