The vice president of human resources at Climpson Industries sent the following recommendation to the company's president."In an effort to improve our employees' productivity, we should implement electronic monitoring of employees' Internet use from their

The vice president of human resources proposes to cease usage of Internet at work place and assumes that such a measure will increase productivity of the employees. It is conventional that human resources want employees to work effectively and the task is not one of the simple ones. Though it might seem that the more time for work a person possess, the more time he or she will spent on it, the implication does not stand scrupulous scrutiny because it rests on plethora of flawed assumptions. To begin with, HR representative must have found out whether employees use Internet for doing their jobs. Imagine extreme picture, when you catch up your marketing intern with Facebook page open at his computer. What a boisterous violation of working routine! But, in fact, he might be checking response of target audience for a new content developed for product’s social page. Or think about less extreme example, open Google page with a search “retailers near me” may indicate not intention to shop but research of a new possible vendor conducted by sales representative. Thus, if Internet usage will be ceased, ability of some employees to perform their duties successfully will be compromised. As a result, the policy of internet usage should take into consideration specific needs of each and every position of the company to determine how much and to what exactly should an employee have access to. Another point to think about before implementing forbidding policies is abilities of human brain to work constantly, non-stop, without breaks. It’s well-known that we, humans, perform better when arduous work interrupted with small breaks for recreation. The arguer assumes that Internet shopping and/or games do not provide necessary for successful performance break. Reasonable person would pinpoint that live chat with a colleague or brief exercise will bring much more recreational value than internet search or on-line games, but people are different and what is restores vital energy for one won’t do anything for another. Thus, if company takes away restorative gaming from employees, the productivity (at least for part of them) will go down. One more flawed assumption which led the author to fallible implication is that employees naturally tend to violate productivity and spent working time on activities other than those related to job. That is not necessarily true. Think about employee who have an important business meeting tomorrow and busy with development of solid slides but, apart from job responsibilities, she needs to do shopping; thus, she safes time for commute to shopping mall and back while doing shopping online and spends that saved time for development of these slides. Barely one could call her violating productivity. Now, let’s think what would she do if internet shopping were forbidden: either come for meeting with less solid slides and were unhappy with her results or came home without groceries and were unhappy with herself as a mother, wife, healthy-life styler and so on. Anyway, the outcome is obvious: she will be unhappy. And unhappy employee will very probably search for a better place to work. In conclusion, the measure suggested by HR department obviously intends to improve work processes of the company but remains open for contestation among reasonable people until the administration will know for sure that opposite effect won’t take place.