Management fears the Internet? Five steps for the corporate communicator.

Friend Shel Holtz is pretty jovial in person but, Lord, he can sure bring depressing news.  In Can You Read This?, he notes:

If you’re behind a company firewall, there’s an increasing chance that you’re not able to read this—or any other—blog.

Fear of the Internet in the C-suite is nothing new; and consultants have exploited that fear from the get-go.

What's the professional communicator to do? Here's my take:

• Education of the C-Suite: Unlike in the mid-1990's, almost all senior managers today use the Internet. Most will admit, if only to themselves, they use the Internet at work for personal reasons. From there, it's often a short leap to "It doesn't affect my productivity" to "It probably doesn't affect my staff's productivity, either".
• Policies: Work with management to make them clear. If management is worried about Internet porn (or gambling, or whatever), remind them that porn is porn -- and a medium is just a medium. In other words, ban the content -- in all media -- rather than wasting time and resources controlling one medium.
• Policies (2): "Confidentiality" is often cited as a reason for restricting net access. Yeah, right. When I was in the US Navy, I worked in the same (top secret) office as Samuel L. Morrison. Naturally, given the time and place, there was no net access. Morrison simply walked out of the place with the stuff hidden in his briefcase. If security is really a concern, Internet access probably isn't the first place to start.
• Work with the Legal Department: Working with clients, I've often seen a "least common denominator" approach to Internet policy. That is, the cheapest and easiest legal solution is to throw some blanket bans out there. But that won't work in a modern organization. Work with them to take the time to develop a more nuanced policy that allows work to get done, while protecting the firm from liability.
• Make policies clear to the staff: Most people want to keep their job, and will abide by common-sense rules. I've run a company of 125 employees, and know that people can just screw up -- but it's almost always by accident. Whenever I had to sort out a major case -- a firable offense -- I almost always found that my employee's poor judgement was connected to a muddy (or unwritten) policy of mine.

What bemuses me about corporate "Internet access restrictions" is that it's all about control. Corporations who focus on Internet access are afraid... afraid they cannot command employee loyalty.

Bad news for them. The company that cannot command employee loyalty almost certainly cannot command customer loyalty or shareholder loyalty.

Technorati tags:
IT policies
Internet access policies
Employee policies

Posted by Allan Jenkins on November 4, 2005 at 10:46 AM in Communication, Corporate Management | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c215853ef00d8352172ce53ef

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Management fears the Internet? Five steps for the corporate communicator.:

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.