As the mid-afternoon lull sets in, you decide to check in with a few folks. When you poke your head in and say hello, you get no response. With their headphones in and Pandora buried beneath a cascade of windows on their desktop, you can see that this employee is clearly focused on the task at hand. You move on to the next cube over- headphones again. Oh well, you can stop by again tomorrow, besides there’s a new Pandora station you’ve been meaning to try.
But what if Pandora wasn’t an option anymore? What about YouTube, ESPN.com, or any other site containing streaming audio or video? Employees all across the country are finding out as more and more employers are unable to keep up these bandwidth hogs.
CNN cited Proctor & Gamble as yet another prominent example of an organization forced to make the decision to block certain sites with streaming content. For P&G employees, Pandora and Netflix are now a thing of the past, but interestingly, both YouTube and Facebook remain accessible.
Their decision to block some but not all streaming content sites reflects yet another challenge that organizations are facing related to streaming content. Even as they ban some sites, organizations must balance their need to preserve network bandwidth, while still retaining access to sites that employees utilize for job related activities, such as marketing or professional networking.
So where does your workplace fall on this continuum from total restriction to total access of streaming content? Has the ongoing struggle for sufficient bandwidth forced your organization to block streaming content? Is bandwidth capacity the issue or is the ban more closely related to questions about employee productivity or other factors?
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