Commentary

Barbara Krasnoff
 

Charge Fines For Computer User Foul-Ups

Recently, a hospital system based in Indianopolis called Clarian Health announced that it was going to start taking money from its employees' paychecks if they didn't meet certain physical standards. I don't think Clarian went far enough -- I think that employees should be penalized for violations involving their technical health as well.

Recently, a hospital system based in Indianopolis called Clarian Health announced that it was going to start taking money from its employees' paychecks if they didn't meet certain physical standards. I don't think Clarian went far enough -- I think that employees should be penalized for violations involving their technical health as well.Clarian's penalties involve subtracting $5 or $10 from the paychecks of employees who don't meet company standards involving cholesterol levels, blood pressure, body mass index, etc. Many people might think that this is a violation of the employees' rights as individuals, or might think that a company might get further with a carrot than a stick.

But as long as you're intent on rapping staff knuckles for costing the company more money on its insurance, why not also charge them for costing the company more money on IT? For example, tell employees that they will:


More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

  • Lose $5 each time they click on a link in any e-mail with a subject line like, "Ebay New Unpaid Item" or "You've received an ecard from a School friend!"

  • Lose $5 each time they go on a porn or game site. Lose another $5 each time they have to call IT to clean their system of spyware.

  • Lose $5 each time they demand the IT staffer show up immediately for an emergency, and then when the staffer shows up, say, "Oops! I forgot to hit the Esc key/forgot to hit Enter/accidentally clicked on the wrong thing. Never mind. Thanks anyway."

  • Lose $10 for clicking on any pop-up that offers to clean your computer and another $10 for installing the software.

  • Lose $20 each time they let their visiting 12-year-old surf on the office computer while they run to that meeting with the boss.

  • Lose $30 each time they take a laptop home without making sure all security features -- encryption, keywords, etc. -- are active. Lose another $30 if they take home a thumb drive or disc with sensitive information on it (unless it's also got encryption and other security measures).
  • Unfortunately, judging from some of the computer users I know, there are some employees -- probably including a manager or two -- who would, were this system put in place, end up pretty much without a paycheck. So maybe it isn't the best idea. Still...


    Related Reading




    Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

    Single tags

    These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

    <br> Defines a single line break

    <hr> Defines a horizontal line

    Matching tags

    These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

    <a> Defines an anchor

    <b> Defines bold text

    <big> Defines big text

    <blockquote> Defines a long quotation

    <caption> Defines a table caption

    <cite> Defines a citation

    <code> Defines computer code text

    <em> Defines emphasized text

    <fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

    <h1> This is heading 1

    <h2> This is heading 2

    <h3> This is heading 3

    <h4> This is heading 4

    <h5> This is heading 5

    <h6> This is heading 6

    <i> Defines italic text

    <p> Defines a paragraph

    <pre> Defines preformatted text

    <q> Defines a short quotation

    <samp> Defines sample computer code text

    <small> Defines small text

    <span> Defines a section in a document

    <s> Defines strikethrough text

    <strike> Defines strikethrough text

    <strong> Defines strong text

    <sub> Defines subscripted text

    <sup> Defines superscripted text

    <u> Defines underlined text

    InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

    Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
    T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
    Subscribe to RSS

    Resource Links