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By Will Sturgeon, 10 November 2003 17:00

NEWS Fighting the war on time-wasting looks like a losing battle for UK bosses still burdened with staff who spend their days emailing, surfing the web and instant messaging - breaking only occasionally to do some work.

One in three companies has now disciplined staff for 'cyber-loafing' - with the most common breaches of internet and email usage policies involving indecent or inappropriate content such as pornography, according to LexisNexis Industrial Relations Services.

For most office staff email is now an integral business tool but the constant temptation to contact friends and enter into lengthy 'dot-comversations' is proving too much for most.

While companies are prepared to tolerate what they deem to be acceptable levels of wastage the problem of inappropriate content represents far more of a headache - going well beyond concerns about dented productivity.

In increasingly litigious times companies now have a duty of care to employees. Those who do not act to stamp out the spread of pornography or offensive emails may soon find themselves in court fighting constructive dismissal cases or sexual harassment claims brought against them by anybody exposed while using company email systems.

Alyn Hockey, product director at Clearswift, said: "I think companies now accept there is going to be a degree of tittle-tattle on email and that's not really a problem for them. The problems come when things move up a gear and employees start disseminating content which is really unsavoury. That's when we are going to start seeing cases being brought against employers.

"Employees have been given a great deal of power by legislation and pretty soon we still start seeing them use it."

Another problem which complicates matters is that technology has now escaped the firm grasp of the IT department with bottom-up implementation of applications such as IM and peer-to-peer services.

Many companies may have been confident about cracking down on email and internet abuse by means of monitoring, filtering and disciplining accordingly, but recent growth in IM and peer-to-peer technologies has effectively blown a hole in their usage policies.

Measures implemented at the firewall and the server to control employees' use of email, and the content they were sending and receiving, have been instantly undermined by IM. With a route straight out of the building employees are able to send and receive whatever attachments and content they want.

Glyn Baker, business development director for secure IM provider FaceTime, said: "We tend to see waves of disruptive technology. First it was email, then web surfing and now instant messaging and other peer-to-peer applications such as Kazaa.

"As well as pornography, which obviously brings its own very serious issues, you have the problem of people sharing pirated software, music and movies on the network and in all these cases I think the liability ends with the corporate."

It seems litigation is the next step. "I'm just waiting for the first UK case to come along and I don't think it will be long," he added.