If you treat employees like kids, they will behave like kids…

One of the least-understood maxims of employee management is that people tend to behave in accordance with the expectations placed in them. In other words, if you treat your employees like kids, they will likely behave like kids.

A few days ago, while preparing a class about Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, I tried accessing a related article in Pando Daily, a well-respected website known for its prescient analysis of the world of technology.

Here’s what happened:

A warning came up from my corporate web admin site telling me that it was denying me access to the page because it had been blocked in accordance with corporate policy. Obviously this was a mistake… a mistake that I could bridge due to having a VPN on my laptop (mine and administered by me, not my company) or a smartphone (again, mine and administered by me, not my company) in my pocket, otherwise it would have prevented me from preparing my session properly.

After sending a mail about the problem — which was sorted out, I must say, in a few minutes — I soon discovered the source of the problem: the list of blocked sites was not my company’s but came from a US-based company that provided the service. The company, from what I can see, believes that it should block any address with the word “Pando” in it, because for several years, this was the name of an application using P2P to deal with large files that closed in August 2013. Pando Daily, the technology site, has been in existence since January 2012, and for no good reason has had its access blocked to all businesses using the services of the company that so carelessly manages this stupid block list.

The procedure, the same used by many companies to prevent employees accessing the social networks via the corporate network, prompts me to wonder on what principles such outfits operate: a system that prevents you from accessing information that may be relevant to your job, effectively slaps you on the hand, telling you: “Aha, caught you! Just what do you think you are doing, stop wasting time, and get back to work!”

Let’s put this into perspective. As a rule, companies no longer use child labor. Most employees are adults, and generally in possession of their mental faculties. Wouldn’t a simple on-screen notification, stating the company’s policies, be sufficient? Is it not possible that if I access my Twitter account during work hours it might be because I have seen an interesting link, and that I am simply marking it for future use? Or might it not be that I want to tweet something, rather than being a loafer who wants to waste the company’s time and money? In this day and age, does anybody really believe that work is about how long we spend behind a desk, rather than about rewarding ability, intelligence, common sense, knowledge, or applying our own criteria?

What’s more, does anybody really think that if this superproxy block is removed, then employees will use their corporate networks to download movies and trade jokes on Facebook? And if they do, then why hire such employees?

Checking that corporate resources are used correctly is the most logical thing in the world, and there is nothing wrong with the workforce knowing that the network is being monitored by the IT department, as long as they do not become a kind of Big Brother. Such policies also allow for security to be centralized, as long as security is not given priority over usability.

But such policies are a long way from blocks imposed by companies whose policies border on paranoia, and who treat their employees like children. This is not only illogical—if people want to chat on the social networks they will do so via their smartphone—but inevitably produces the opposite result to that desired: if you treat me like a child, I will behave like one.

(En español, aquí)