One of my biggest pet peeves is companies that block access to certain websites. The logic behind this is sound – people are at work to, well, work, not surf the web or check their personal email. But I think it is the wrong response. My wife just started working for one of these companies, so this is again a top of mind issue for me. In the interest of full disclosure, this is an issue that makes me irrationally angry; hopefully writing about it here will save me from expensive psycho-therapy down the road. Anyway, here’s what I think. 

For starters, history would indicate that blocking sites is short sighted. People will find a way to access the content that they want. It is probably impossible to block every non-work-related website without blocking many that are legitimately work-related, but even if you try, people who are dead set on goofing off will find another site to look at. Blocking ESPN.com will just send these people to a smaller lesser known sports site. The same principle applies to applications. One person recently emailed me a story saying that his company blocked AOL Instant Messenger, which he used to communicate with an offsite contractor, but not AOL’s website, from which he could use a web-based version of the tool. So while you can keep adding to the list of things you block, people will find away around it.

But even if you could make this approach work, I still don’t think it is the right strategy. Surfing the web is the 21st century’s version of going to the water cooler. Stopping people from doing this sends employees the message that you don’t trust them to get their jobs done. Here’s another analogy: In the offline world if someone takes so many bathroom breaks that they aren’t getting their work done at an acceptable level you fire that person, you don’t barricade off the bathroom. More broadly, the Internet has changed the nature of work; people can and do work from anywhere at any time. If you want your employees to check their email on the weekends or finish a report at night then a logical tradeoff is allowing them to buy a book from Amazon when they are at the office. If you want a job to become a part of a person’s life then you have to give the person more control over how they fit their job into their life. That means sacrificing some of the control a company typically has over the work environment. There are probably people who will use this new found freedom to slack off, but there are probably many more people who will use it to organize their life in a way that makes them more productive. The upshot is that making sure that you hire people who fit the latter description becomes much more important.

One last thing: blocking some sites may have the exact opposite outcome from what the strategy intends. I have a friend who works at a law firm that blocks Yahoo, which he can’t believe since the firm otherwise goes to incredible lengths to keep employees in the office at all times. He says that people would be more inclined to stay at the office later if they could take a 15 minute break to check their personal email accounts, read a few news headlines, and set their fantasy team’s lineup.

I can already anticipate a few counter arguments so if you have one feel free to write it in the comments section.

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