As the 1-800-FLOWERS.com company found out that they are in some kind of an uncomfortable and troubling situation, we rather decide to make a thorough investigation of the case which initiated by Mr. Gerard M. Gallagher, Senior Vice President of Business Affairs, General Counsel and Secretary himself. This report intends to locate the problems and to make proper recommendation for the potential solution of it.
One of the possible causes that have seen in the investigation, which also admitted by the company, is the uncontrollable and unsupervised usage of company computers for personal use of its employees. Such dilemma is recognized but is not or will never be accepted by the company. However, because there is no existing computer-use policy or protocol formulated by the company, it affects employee’s behavior and judgment whether their usage for personal use is legally unethical or not.
Lacking of computer use policy for 1-800-FLOWERS.com believably undervalues their employees’ capacity and ability to explore and maximize the advancement of modern technologies. Moreover, it is obsolete that the world’s leading florist and multi-channel retailer company has no computer policy until this date. Hence, the recommendation for this case is no other than to have the 1-800-FLOWERS.com formulate a Computer-Use Policy for all employees whether they are from the rank and file workers or managerial staffs or top administrators.
Having this kind of policy would facilitate the dos and don’ts of using company computers. This will also serve as guide for them to know up to what extent of using company’s time and computers is legally ethical and which usage is not considered ethical. Below is the suggested degree of ethical and unethical usage of computer as needed for the recommendation of formulating a 1-800-FLOWERS.com company’s Computer-Use Policy.
Legally Ethical Computer Usage
Aside from using computer for company’s sake, limited personal use that might help his nature of work would be considered legally or ethically justifiable. Personal usage fall for this conduct are personal email retrieving and sending during break time and lunch break only, printing tax returns, reading news online, and surfing internet to look for maps and waypoint locations only.
Illegal and Unethical Computer Usage
Using company’s computer is considered illegal if the employee gambles all day long checking his/her personal email accounts. Additional offense could be streaming movies or watching porn videos and photos, printing bundle of copies of his/her favorite novels and poems, playing computer games online or offline, and surfing the internet for possible destination of his/her family’s vacation, etc.
Another option is to have all computers synchronized to the mother computer unit because it will cater not only those of the desktop computers in the offices but laptop computers issued to the staff as well. However, this is somewhat complex than the recommended one above and is rather considered as the secondary recommendation due to some issues. The scope of the suggested recommendation only deals desktop computers that are situated in 1-800-FLOWERS.com offices and business areas. Laptop computers issued to some of the staff are not covered of that recommendation.
We all know that because laptop computers are portable and thus, they are thrice as difficult to supervise. Its users can do anything he/she wants to even though the owner of that laptop is technically the 1-800-FLOWERS.com. Laptop computer offers a lot of help because even the staffs are not on their offices on office hours due to some inevitable circumstances such as stuck in traffic jam or in the airport or in some business trips, they can still manage to work and supervise the business and their subordinates without using bandwidth and electricity of the company.
A 1-800-FLOWERS.com computer-use policy would surely benefit the company, Gerard M. Gallagher, his people, and their market share as well. Being the world’s leading florist, they will soon regain back the top ranking as they are now knew the problems that they facing, its domino effect, the probable cause and the recommended solutions to overcome such dilemma if it happens again in the future.
