Is Internet Filtering Right for Your Business?

As a business owner or manager, it’s only natural for you to want the very best for your business, and when it comes to what’s best for business, there’s just one word that describes it all: success. In order for you to achieve success, you need to make sure that your employees are as productive as possible. After all, it’s expensive to hire, train and continue to keep employees on your payroll, so it’s crucial that you get the very most you can from the investment that you’ve made in each employee.

The first step is, of course, to hire the right employees. This involves advanced recruitment and screening techniques, conducting multiple interviews with each prospective employee, and providing every new hire with an adequate amount of training to allow him or her to perform at an optimum level. The more successful your employees are, the better it is for your business.

In today’s business climate, however, even if you are careful to take all the steps listed above, there’s yet another obstacle that you must overcome to ensure that your employees are being as productive as possible: the Internet. This tool, the same one that has streamlined so many business processes over the past several years, has proven to be a powerful distraction for many employees. Some recent studies indicate that employees spend an inordinate amount of time doing personal business on the Internet, which leads to a marked lack of productivity. This, in turn, can be extremely detrimental for your business.

Some business owners and managers have attempted to resolve the issue by using Internet filtering to stop their employees from accessing certain websites. Although a web filter can definitely be effective in blocking access to some websites, it rarely solves the problem. The fact is that these products usually block access to entire categories of websites rather than just a few. Within those categories are often sites that would be useful to your employees in their day-to-day tasks.

There’s another reason why this approach to the problem won’t work, and that is smart phone and tablet PC technology. Research suggests that most workers in the U.S. carry smart phones and/or tablet PCs with them each and every day. This means that they have access to the Internet 24/7. You may be able to use a web filter to control what sites an employee visits on his or her work computer, but you’ll never be able to control that employee’s use of the Internet thanks to smart phone and tablet PC technology.

If you’ve considered using Internet filtering to address your employees’ misuse of the Internet, think again. Put simply, it won’t solve the problem.