How to stop my employees from playing games during work?

[etalns]

Hey all, this summer my company will be opening our tech support center. We'll be starting with about 8 staff on at all times, but we're using all our manpower at all times so we dont have someone patrolling around watching all the computers.

One thing I am very worried about is employees just playing games and when a call comes just letting someone else take it, because they're in the middle of their game. I was wondering if there were any programs out there that could let me remotely monitor all the monitors? Or something of that sort to prevent them from playing on my paid time.

 

[BigJohnKC]

Introduce them to ATOT. It's not like playing games, you can take a call in the middle of a post without losing the game. Plus, you can leave any time.....or can you??

 

[gopunk]

how much are you paying them? if it's above average, chances are they won't want to lose their job anyways

or, you could locate the call center in a high-traffic area. so people frequently walk by... it's like free monitoring

 

[propellerhead]

Are you FBI?

 

[etalns]

Well, I've encouraged them all to begin using ATOT. As they'll be offering technical support to our customers, who are purchasing computers. I dont mind if they're lounging on the boards, as I'm sure they'd then take the calls. But I'm nervous about them starting to play games, all our computers are very good (not to alot of you guys ) but compared to what other companies provide their employees they're great. (2.0 GHZ P4's, 60 gig HD's, 512 mb of ram (needed for all the CS progs they run sim. and geforce 3 ti 200's).

I was hoping to put some programs on these things so I can monitor them remotely at any time, but the thing I'm thinking is, these guys got alot more computer knowledge than me, that's why I hired them so they'll most likely have the knowledge to stop this program from working, or they'd be sending a fake feed or something of that sort

 

[Viper GTS]

Establish a zero-tolerance policy & enforce it.

Block all the common games sites (Yahoo games, etc.).

The key is set the rule & enforce it.

Viper GTS

 

[etalns]

Our call centre will be based out of our new warehouse, we pay them $19/hour.

 

[gopunk]

Originally posted by: Qosis
Well, I've encouraged them all to begin using ATOT. As they'll be offering technical support to our customers, who are purchasing computers. I dont mind if they're lounging on the boards, as I'm sure they'd then take the calls. But I'm nervous about them starting to play games, all our computers are very good (not to alot of you guys ) but compared to what other companies provide their employees they're great. (2.0 GHZ P4's, 60 gig HD's, 512 mb of ram (needed for all the CS progs they run sim. and geforce 3 ti 200's).

I was hoping to put some programs on these things so I can monitor them remotely at any time, but the thing I'm thinking is, these guys got alot more computer knowledge than me, that's why I hired them so they'll most likely have the knowledge to stop this program from working, or they'd be sending a fake feed or something of that sort

hmm, do they need a good vid card? if you just stuck them with a 8 mb 2d one, they won't be able to play any games (well, maybe shockwave pong).

 

[etalns]

We will be enforcing a no-gaming policy, we run on the 3 strike rule.

But I hear alot on these boards about people playing games at work, and a friend of mine who is a CEO of a large telecom company says his company struggles with loss of work time due to people not doing their job.

Our workers are required to also document each problem, so once the phone call is "done" it's not so much done for them. They must document what happened, and what they did to fix this. So we can eventually compile a trouble shooting manual for new employees so we can get lesser qualified ones and just have a few high end techs

 

[joohang]

Unless they are having a LAN party fest, playing games at work is not too bad, as long as it doesn't ruin the work environment. If your tech support centre gets like 1 or 2 calls every 3 hours, playing some light shockwave games wouldn't hurt for your employees to kill their boredom.

And I agree with gopunk. Why GeForce3?

 

[gopunk]

qosis - do they have to be able to install stuff? if you're running any nt based windows, you can just not allow them permission to install.

also, don't let them read this thread... not good for moral

 

[etalns]

That was the biggest mistake I made without a doubt Gopunk When our distributor was speaking to me about what parts I wanted, I overlooked the thought of people goofing off at work and stated GF3 ti200's.

 

[etalns]

qosis - do they have to be able to install stuff? if you're running any nt based windows, you can just not allow them permission to install.

The problem is that once in a while we'll have to install new software so we can help customers software-trouble shoot (we offer it with all of our computers, even if the product isn't from us, to make a better user-experience)

 

[etalns]

Unless they are having a LAN party fest, playing games at work is not too bad, as long as it doesn't ruin the work environment. If your tech support centre gets like 1 or 2 calls every 3 hours, playing some light shockwave games wouldn't hurt for your employees to kill their boredom.

I'm not really worried about them playing shockwave games, I'd be fine with that as long as they took their phone calls in a timely fashion and did what was requested of them.

What I'm worried about them is playing games like HL etc, it may sound silly, but I'm paranoid as hell

 

[gopunk]

Originally posted by: Qosis
That was the biggest mistake I made without a doubt Gopunk When our distributor was speaking to me about what parts I wanted, I overlooked the thought of people goofing off at work and stated GF3 ti200's.

well... you could buy the cheapo vid cards and swap 'em out... then just put the gf3's in the computers you build (i'm assuming they're unused).

 

[BigJohnKC]

My company effectively stops all online game playing by running all internet connections through a proxy server with a sh!tty internet filer on it (Symantec Web Security). You can't play most online games like that because java applets won't run correctly through a proxy server. I'm not sure about the filter software, but I'm sure there's a way to make it so shockwave games can't be played either. As for them installing games, maybe you can set the permissions on the hard drive so that they don't have permission to write any data to the drives except for in a few directories... ? Come to think of it, I'm not sure if you can do that in Windows, you may need a unix system to do that, which may not be an option. Anything that can be configured on the local system will be hacked into if these people are as smart as you say they are. You'll have to restrict access somewhere else like on the server they log in to.

 

[OREOSpeedwagon]

Okay, guess I'm a bit slow posting. What you could do from time to time is do a Start > Search > for files and folders and search the network for files like HL.exe (or whatever the exe is for HL, been so long since I've played it).

 

[Yo Ma Ma]

Look for the results, perhaps the games would be OK so long as they are still taking the calls and not blowing them off onto someone else as you mentioned. Will they keep log books, citing # of calls taken & time spent on each call? If all seems fairly well distributed work-wise then maybe the game-playing won't be an issue.

 

[DAM]

You can install vnc as a service, but they will probably disable it, no matter what yo ushould have a base software package, and have that on all computers, and NOTHING else will be installed on those computers, you can have one machine with admin privs for everyone, you want to install a special piece of software you put it here, and then you go back to your machine.



dam(presto)

 

[gopunk]

i'm headed for lunch, but here is my summary

1. see if you can't swap out the vid cards
2. if not, what bigjohn said might work
3. whatever you do, don't act overly paranoid around your employees, they'll hate you for it
4. if you catch someone, i suggest a verbal warning, just as you happen to be passing by, so that the other employees can overhear it. second offence, i would fire them, and let the other employees figure out the reason behind it.

 

[etalns]

Look for the results, perhaps the games would be OK so long as they are still taking the calls and not blowing them off onto someone else as you mentioned. Will they keep log books, citing # of calls taken & time spent on each call? If all seems fairly well distributed work-wise then maybe the game-playing won't be an issue.

Yes, we'll have in-depth log books, of when a call came, how many calls were being taken at that time, and how quick the call was taken.

The vid cards are unused, so I'll look into having them replaced.

 

[Ally24k]

put them behind a firewall, that is what my boss did to me. now i cant go on aim, aim express, or yahoo games .

 

[Kango]

I think that if you held a meeting or printed a memo ttelling them what you thought was acceptable and what wasn't, most people wouldn't have any problem with following the rules. For $19/hour I'd damned well follow a few basic rules.

As long as I was allowed to surf the web, and maybe play a few shockwave games or Yahoo Literati with the guy sitting next to me, then I'd be fine. Hell, most turn-based strategy games would probably even be ok as long as people understood they had a priority to do their job. No need to seem like the Game Nazi. You shouldn't be bored to tears at work, but there is no reason you should expect to play Half-life.

 

[kranky]

Our rules say no loading of ANY software on company computers, without exception. First offense is a 3-day suspension, next one is termination. Make up your mind now what the rules will be and write them up. Make each employee sign it (above their signature put something like "I acknowledge I have read and understand the computer usage rules").

I guarantee you will have to make an example of someone, because someone will have to show how l33t he is. You better be prepared to take whatever action you wrote in your policy, because if you don't you will lose the respect of everyone there. So if on the second day you have to suspend or fire someone for breaking the rules, do it. It will probably be the last time anyone tries anything.

 

[gunf1ghter]

Where this seems to be headed is with software that dumps a screenshot from the client's PC to a monitoring server... it can even be set up to take one snapshot every so many minutes and keep a 24 hr log.

I know that at my work playing games is severely frowned upon. Since even our low end techs can earn $40K a year I don't see any problem outlawing game playing.