Internet Access in the Office: Pro or Con?
Unfettered internet access in the workplace is nearly uniformly available in electronic practices today – that is, practices with computer systems and some form of electronic billing. Employees usually feel that unlimited, unmonitored access to the web is their entitlement. After all, it is an indispensable tool in everyday life today, from banking to messaging to shopping. And (pardon the ungrammatical use of the ‘and’ to start the sentence – I am using literary license here) it certainly can serve as a very useful office tool. But in the workplace, these are all distractions, wasting the practice’s money and drastically affecting employee productivity.
So what can you, the owner, do to strike a reasonable balance between granting employees limitless internet access and banishing them to the electronic dark ages?
The first step is determining what access employees need for legitimate work-related purposes, what access would make employees happy without seriously interfering with the office’s work flow or security, and what access requires outright proscription. Once you have determined that, it is time to have your IT staff (or consultants) properly program your firewall.
[A firewall is a piece of hardware, a gatekeeper of sorts, which sits between the nasty virus- and hacker-filled world of the internet, and your naïve and homely office server and computers. It is an absolutely essential piece of hardware; if you have IT staff in place that has not already cajoled you into purchasing a firewall, you have a problem.]
The firewall can, in most cases, be programmed with what types of internet services to allow (such as web surfing and email), what services to forbid (such as instant messaging and VOIP calls), and what services to limit (such as certain websites or classes of websites, such as pornography or shopping). What capabilities your firewall will have will depend on the model and how much you are willing to spend on it. It is worth noting, when you compile this list, that some pornography firewall settings may actually prevent you the clinician from accessing legitimate medical websites – if your firewall can be programmed to exempt you from its settings, that is a good workaround for this limitation.
Just before having your IT staff program your firewall, have a frank heart-to-heart with your staff to discuss the changes you are planning to make. Explain yourself well. Bear in mind that your younger employees may react as if you are planning to amputate a limb, and will require smooth handling.
It may serve you well, for your relationship with the staff, to share your new internet access policies with them without putting all of them into play in the firewall programming (possibly with some exceptions, such as pornography or myspace and facebook), asking them to police themselves. Some firewalls allow you to monitor the employees’ access, either as individuals or in the aggregate, and you can determine if self-policing is working. If you do plan to monitor your employees, let them know (including in writing, in your employee handbook), and share your findings with them should you decide to curtail their access in the future.