Fired for Playing Fantasy Football at Work?
You bet your sweet pass…

Fidelity Investments, one of the world’s largest providers of financial services, recently fired four employees for playing Fantasy Football at work. One person admitted he knew “Fidelity had a policy against playing fantasy football at the office” but did it anyway.

According to a Fidelity spokesperson, “We have clear policies that relate to gambling. Participation in any form of gambling through the use of Fidelity time or equipment or any other company resource is prohibited. In addition to being illegal in a lot of places, it can also be disruptive. We want our employees to be focused on our customers and clients.”  Whether you agree or disagree that this should have been a fire-able offense, Fidelity clearly took steps to uphold its policy against gambling at work.

Does your company have an Internet Acceptable Use Policy in place?

SpectorSoft offers a free whitepaper along with a sample AUP to help businesses get started: www.spector360.com/whitepapers/index.htm.  The next important step is to enforce the AUP using an award-winning corporate monitoring solution like Spector 360: www.spector360.com.

Spector 360 records everything an employee does at the PC and on the Internet, including web sites visited, emails sent and received, chats and instant messages, keystrokes typed, files transferred, documents printed, and applications run. Through a first-of-its-kind surveillance camera-like recording tool, Spector 360 can also show in exact visual detail what an employee does every step of the way.

If your employees are gambling online during work hours, Spector 360 will detect and record it. Spector 360 can also identify who is exchanging Fantasy Football scores via chat, email or IM; logging into NFL.com to play; printing team spreadsheets at work; or taking excessively long breaks to manage an online league.

But don’t just take our word for it. Numerous Spector 360 Success Stories illustrate in detail just how effective our products are at minimizing liability and risk, while saving tens of thousands of dollars in productivity losses. Customers also tell us that monitored employees are more self-governing and tend to enjoy the workplace more because they know the person sitting next to them isn’t abusing the system at their expense.

That is, except the Fidelity guys, who weren’t thinking clearly.  Neither were the folks on our list of the Top 10 Dumbest Things Monitored Employees Have Been Caught Doing at work. If you’re a SpectorSoft customer with a workplace story that tops these, drop us a line at:  info@spectorsoft.com.

And you can bet your sweet pass that the “Fidelity Four” will be featured in the next edition of our Top Ten Dumbest Things list … score!