Introduction
The Webpages rules allow organizations to effectively manage and control employee browsing habits. You can use these rules to ensure corporate resources are used productively, prevent access to inappropriate or dangerous content, or manage the time employees spend on non-work-related websites.
Rule Walkthrough
The example below uses a Webpages rule to detect social media sites and restrict user's active time on them.
Setting Up the Rule
General Settings
1. Assign a Rule Name. For example, “Limit social media usage”.
2. Select a Parent Policy. For example, “Admin Policy”.
3. Select “Activity” for Rule Type.
4. Select “Webpages” under Select the type of activities.
Helpful Resources:
Employees
5. Turn on the Inherit targets from Parent Policy option to use the policy’s default targets.
6. Alternatively, turn it off and manually select the employees, departments and/or computers for the rules target from the Assign to field.
7. Optionally, you can exclude targets in the Exclude from rule field.
Helpful Resources:
Webpages
8. A default condition block, "Condition 1," should already be added to the rule. Configure the condition as follows:
Condition 1
9. Add the Webpage url criterion by clicking the +Add button.
10. In the Webpage url field, enter the social media websites you want to detect. Enter them one by one (e.g., "facebook", "instagram.com", etc.) and set the condition to Contains for each entry. You can ignore the rest of the options in for this criterion.
11. Add the Day time active criterion by clicking the +Add button.
12. In the Day time active field, enter a number such as "15", then select a condition like ">=".
Helpful Resources:
Actions
13. Select the Warn action.
14. Add a message. For example, “Social media usage is limited to 15 minutes per day.”.
15. Optionally, turn on the Use HTML Template option to show the message in a visually appealing template.
Help Reference:
Rationale for the Rule
Unrestricted access to social media can significantly impact employee focus, decrease overall productivity, and lead to unnecessary work delays. While short breaks involving social media may be acceptable or even necessary for specific job roles (such as marketing or community management), the goal is to prevent excessive, non-productive use.
This rule is built around two primary criteria to accurately enforce a time limit: Webpage url is used to specifically identify known social media sites (e.g., "facebook," "instagram," "reddit"), and Day Time Active is used to measure the cumulative active time an employee spends on those sites within a work day.
The rule can be refined using additional configurations, such as allowing longer access for marketing staff by choosing them from the Employees tab or only enforcing the limit during core business hours with the Time when rule is active
option on the General Settings tab.