And ethical questions are mushrooming well beyond the propriety of workers frittering away a morning shopping online or secretly viewing pornographic Web sites. The flood of e-mail traffic cost Lockheed Martin hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, and the employee lost his job. Every day, companies face unexpected twists in the world of virtual morality. This is a new spin on the old nuisance of employees making personal phone calls at work, but with greatly magnified possibilities. For one thing, the Web can be extremely seductive, lulling users to click screen after screen for hours at a time.
Productivity can indeed suffer when dozens or hundreds of workers succumb to the temptation.
What's more, unlike phone calls, electronic messages are often retrievable months or years later, and can be used as evidence in litigation against companies or individual employees. In addition, though many workers don't realize it, when they surf the Web from work they are literally dragging their company's name along with them. Most Web sites can, and often do, trace the Internet hookups their visitors are using and identify the companies behind them. That leaves a serious potential for embarrassment if employees are visiting any number of places, from job-search sites to racist chat rooms. Caught off guard by the geometric growth of such issues, many companies have lost all hope of handling matters case by case.