How to Monitor Employee Usage

Do you get involved in the personal lives of your employees? Have you conducted an analysis of the effort required to monitor your employees’ off-hours social media usage? How does a company determine where to draw the line and at what cost and then how does a company actually conduct the monitoring?

If you determine that you should be monitoring employee usage, you then need to determine what risks you are trying to mitigate and how you will mitigate those risks. As we have been discussing, you do have the tools to monitor employees, both free and paid. What you monitor is for an individual company to decide. If you monitor employee Twitter accounts, assuming you find out what employees’ user names are, you might find something like the tweet shown in Figure 12-1, in which an employee is complaining about his or her job and may be looking for a new job!

Figure 12-1 Example of an “I hate job” post on Twitter

Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to find out employees’ Twitter names. If you do a search for your company name, you may come across employees referencing your company. Monitoring is nowhere near an exact science at this point. As shown in Figure 12-2, Gary does not have his company name associated with his profile information but Alex does have UMiami and BarCampMiami associated with his profile. If employees do not have company names associated with profile descriptions, you can probably get results based on links or mentions in the actual tweets if a company name is used.

Figure 12-2 Profiles with and without company name mentions

Monitoring can be very different across all industries. While the financial and pharmaceutical industries have many specific requirements that must be monitored, the retail world is generally more open ended. Regulations are constantly evolving. Human Resources has to identify the specific types of data that should be tracked and work with IT to develop the right search criteria using the tools we’ve discussed to implement the management requirements.

Once you’ve defined the requirements for monitoring, you need to assign roles and responsibilities regarding who will undertake the actual monitoring and reporting. When should IT get involved versus Human Resources versus Legal or Marketing? Who owns the tools needed to do the monitoring and who is responsible for using the tools? Who has the time to monitor 24/7? Specific filters need to be in place to help you look for what is important to your company; otherwise, you will waste a lot of time reading through useless search results. In Chapter 14, we get into more depth about how to set up your monitoring filters. If you are an information-based company, then you are looking for specific confidential data being posted. If you are a Legal firm, then you might be more concerned about your client’s information being spread around inappropriately. You can’t really anticipate and set up a search for “employee takes bath in restaurant sink.” What is important to you?