Monitoring Employees on Networks 1

Monitoring Employees on Networks

Ashlee Vanderwal

IT 205

July 16, 2010

Nicole Hickland
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Monitoring Employees on Networks

E-mail is a very important form of communication for businesses to use; it allows quick

communication with others- employees, customers, competitors, and suppliers- and when time is

of the essence it is much more efficient than “snail” mail or US postal service. Some ways

organizations can benefit from e-mail are; improve productivity, speeds up communications,

allows multitasking, quick delivery of memos or other documents and can help keep others

informed of progress. E-mail can also serve as an instant messaging type service, when one

needs an answer but don’t have the time to be on the phone- allowing that person to multitask.

However, not all communications can or should be directed through e-mail for security reasons

especially with information sensitive documents. In addition; employees could personally

communicate through e-mail to friends and family, which may hinder productivity if too much

time is spent personally communicating. The way I see it is, on cannot not expect an employee

to have any personal forms of communication while at work, but what is an acceptable amount?

For this reason, some organizations may limit the use of email to employees. This may be

effective but unnecessary. If an employee spends most of his or her time at work then an

employer should expect some level of personal communication to happen during working hours-

it is almost unavoidable.

An email path is comparable to a postmark on US Postal mail, it gives the route of which

and how that message was delivered. Once the “send” button is initiated, the information is

coded and then sent from the users (composer) computer to an email server in which it is stored,

decoded and sent to the other users (recipient) computer. This information is all stored in email

as well and can be found in the header section of the email; information such as IP address,
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computer sent to and from, time, date, and servers sent to and from is some of the information

that can be included.

Instant messaging is much like e-mail except it is “real time” based, meaning when one

hits the send button, the recipient receives message shortly after. This service can be helpful to

organizations because it offers on demand information while still being able to complete other

tasks. The benefits can include; faster services, quicker answers and ordering, and status updates.

However like any task over the internet, the information can be disclosed to the wrong people.

Web pages are documents found over the internet in hyper text markup language

(HTML) format used to give or receive information. Since there are an infinite number of web

pages out there, finding the right one may require the use of a search engine. The use of web

pages and search engines access the information of the computer being used and stores it to the

server, thus keeping track of all sites being accessed. This could benefit an organization by

targeting people for services and products.

I think companies should monitor an employee’s activity, to a certain extent, to maintain

workplace productivity. If employees are spending too much time surfing or handling personal

matters over the internet, then their workload needs to be re-evaluated.