Caught in the Act: Visiting Illicit Web Sites While on the Job

Abstract

A supervisor was asked to meet with the Human Resource Manager in his office.  When she arrived, he informed her that IT had discovered that one of her employees had breached the information system’s firewall and had been spending between one and two hours each day of work time over the past two weeks visiting pornographic web sites. When she heard this, she sighed and shook her head in disgust.  “I can’t believe this.  I am so angry that Jeremy would do this.  He is such a nice guy but he has been stealing time from us during a period when everyone has been working under a lot of pressure and feeling a lot of stress.”  After letting her blow off some steam, the HR manager stated that he knew that retention of employees in her department had been a challenge over the past couple of years, and that she had been working hard to upgrade the quality of her workers.  He then very directly asked her “What do you want us to do?”  Upon hearing this, the supervisor realized she had an important decision to make.