If you are managing a team of IT workers or just have a secretary sitting in front of a computer, chances are that they don’t spend all of their paid work time doing their assigned jobs. Instead, they might be doing all sorts of stuff: reading news, watching YouTube flicks, or even playing computer games. As obvious as it sounds, it is not easy to catch them playing an office-killer game, as these games often come with the ‘boss key’ feature, which makes the game disappear quickly when they press a single button.
What can you do to make your employees more productive, and to stop them from chatting or playing games at the workplace?
The first and obvious choice, at least for IT related industries, is using Windows built-in user account control and security policies to prevent running any applications that are not explicitly permitted. For example, this would limit the download and use of any chat and instant messenger programs. Unfortunately, too tight a policy can severely limit their working performance should they need to do something that was not initially permitted. On the other hand, a too loose policy may open doors to Flash-based games,...