While the two-year-old story about SEC workers watching porn dominated the headlines, the real story about workplace porn got lost.

The real story is that the practice has grown so common, that the SEC story shouldn’t really have been news to anyone, even if it had occurred yesterday. The latest Nielsen survey on porn at work shows that 21 million Americans accessed pornography from their work computers in March. That’s 29 percent of the total workforce.

The previous Nielsen poll conducted in November of 2008 showed that roughly 25 percent of the workforce sought out pornography on work computers, which is a 16 percent increase in a period of 16 months.

While the SEC story is getting big play because of the financial reform bill working its way through Congress and the Goldman hearings on Capitol Hill, this is the story that employers need to be paying attention to. These statistics show that not only is the problem already widespread enough to cause severe productivity and liability problems, it’s rapidly getting worse. If the trend continues at its current rate, roughly one-third of the American workforce will be regularly accessing pornography at work by June of next year.

So why is this such a big problem for employers?

• If an employee sees a colleague viewing pornography on a company computer, then that company has just created a hostile work environment, and made itself liable to a sexual harassment lawsuit. Such lawsuits average $250,000 in cost before legal fees.
• If a quarter to a third of your employees are viewing porn videos, then you are likely using over half your company’s expensive bandwidth to allow that activity. Add in other common activities like playing games and watching YouTube videos, and you’ve got a full-on bandwidth bottleneck that can slow down the productivity of your entire network.
• Obviously if people are looking at porn they are not working, and that’s costing you even more money

To say nothing of the bad press that such malfeasance can cast on your company or organization, damaging its reputation and costing it opportunities.

Fortunately, there are solutions out there for businesses of all sizes. Our solutions, Ethershield and Safe Eyes Business, are tailored to fit small and medium sized businesses and organizations, and provide easy-to-use and affordable filtering and monitoring to prevent costly liability and productivity loss.

Filed under: Internet Safety News