Shawn Romer’s article “Your Employees Probably are
Shopping While they Work. Here's How to Handle it” was
featured in Crain’s Cleveland Business on December
17, 2015.
This holiday season, more employees than ever before are likely
to use work computers and work time to shop online for gifts.
A recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder found that 50% of
workers intend to do online shopping at work this holiday season,
which is up by 3 percentage points from last year. While the
simplest solution to this issue may be to completely ban all
non-work related computer usage, for a number of reasons, this is
probably not realistic or advisable.
Monitoring for work-related computer usage is often difficult
and likely leading to non-uniform enforcement that could give
disgruntled employees ammunition if making some type of disparate
impact claim. Further, truly work-related content could be
proactively banned, inhibiting your employees’ ability to do
what they need to do.
