Nanny employers - do you have restricted access to your PC for your nanny?

[Pennies]

A friend of mine was telling me how she found that her nanny was accessing porn on her (my friend's) PC .

It had never occurred to me it might be necessary to limit access, but I suppose I'm a bit concerned a nanny might spend hours on Facebook or Mumsnet !

What do you do about this, if anything?

my last contract had a clause in it that said i could only use the internet for work purposes - so stuff for the children or with them

If a nanny wants to find ways of wasting time other than take care of your children they will. Be it a book or the television. It's one of those things you have to trust them with in my opinion (as an ex nanny). And sometimes it can be really handy, today I showed the children I look after how to do ring a ring a roses on youtube as they are all so little and couldn't grasp what I was trying to show them!

The contract should deal with it - no personal use of computer during working hours, (but available for reasonable use outside working hours if live-in), inappropriate use including porn, hacking, spam, abuse may result in summary dismissal.

I also find that it is necessary for the contract to say, and for you to go through this with the nanny, that during working hours she must devote herself exclusively to her duties. That doesn't mean that she can't sit down with a cup of tea for half an hour while a baby sleeps, but it does mean that she is not being paid to spend time on the internet.

Agree with others re: putting it in contract and that if you have a nanny who wants to waste time - they will regardless of the outlet.

An idea is to have a guest account set up on the PC for the nanny with limited access (you can prohibit any downloads, put a security program up, etc.) to make sure she only looks at stuff related to the kids. Or you can simply deny her access at all, which I don't think is the end of the world really.

again i feel it comes down to trust

i have passwords for both mb+db laptops

both are happy for me to pop on during the day/when baby asleep/older one at nursery etc and have a little surf/check email/use fb/come on mn etc

and like navyeyelash, my 7yr loves watching pink/barbie girl on youtube or plays games on ceebeebies so also educational

when mb was on ml or is working from home,she will stop and hand me her lappy for an hour or so, while she had lunch

there has been times that both db/mb have asked me to go onto their laptops and send documents (both are linked to their work ones)

otherwise i would never dream on going into their personal stuff on file,anymore than i would rumage through their underwear drawer

and even if you did limit laptop use, tbh most nannies have phones/blackberrys that link to internet and can go on fb/mn etc whener they want

mranchovy - most nannies can multitask , so can have a cuppa while baby is asleep+go on the internet, while making sure they dont neglect their duties/charges

I agree with Blondes..it is a question of trust in the end.

I must say I never thought of limiting access to our PC for our nanny. Our nanny is live in and our dd still kips for over an hour every day so I am perfectly happy for our nanny to spend that time on our PC.

Obviously if your friend has evidence that her nanny has access inapropriate material on their PC she has to deal with it straight away, as it is clearly inappropriate behaviour.

Blondes in my experience (with nannies and in the 'real world'), employer/employee relationships do not go wrong through lack of trust, they go wrong through lack of communication.

You can only trust your nanny to meet your expectations if you tell her what they are!

Again in my experience, 20% of employees need a very light touch managing - they are the ones like you Blondes who can always be trusted to balance their own and their employer's goals and work on their own initiative. 20% need managing out - you will not be able to lower your expectations enough to get to a level they are willing to meet. That leaves 60% that you need to work with to set and achieve common goals.

Being a good employer is not about how much slack you give someone who is in the top 20%, it is about how well you deal with the 60%. Plus the art of identifying which category you are dealing with!

Many nannies including me work 12+ hour days. Are you really saying Mr Anchovy that we can not take any break in that time other than a silent cuppa? I have an extremely busy job with several children, schools runs etc, but there are still times when it is possible to grab 20 minutes for myself. I think it's essential for my mental health! Also, children really do not need your undivided attention for the entire day - it's essential for their long term happiness that they develop the ability to be content doing independent activities.

WE don't restrict access. But if we found a string of porno sites on the logs, you bet she'd be looking for another job.

Mr. A, I think only your top 20% are qualified to be nannies. There is nobody home to manage the nanny. So if he/she can't manage him/herself then he/she is in the wrong job.

I disagree Strix. I shouldn't have referred to the 'top' 20% - in fact some of the best performers end up in the 'manage out' 20%, capable but unmanageable.

Communicating your expectations to someone does not mean micro-managing them. I'ts the difference between:

1. Saying before the start of the first school term 'I want the kids to walk to and from school, which means 2 45 minute round trips for you. Of course if it's pissing with rain that's no fun for anyone so take the car, but that should be the exception not the rule'.

and 2. Saying each morning 'make sure you walk to school to pick the kids up this afternoon'.

If you have tried 1. and it didn't work, so you have to do 2. that is when you need to move on.

you need to check if she is actually looking at the porn herself or if it came up accidentily (yes this can still happen on some sites - then i opens multiple popups when you try to close it).

i do think you should have a word to her about it to find out what happened at let he know you know.

lala, I don't think I was saying that, the cup of tea was meant to be an example and I didn't mean to imply it should be silent or only once in a 12 hour day.

Mr Anchovy, I don't see what the difference is between sitting with a cuppa for half an hour and sitting with a cuppa and internet for half an hour?

Mr A, your equations seem to me to much more applicable to the city than they do to domestic employment. Any nanny of mind must manage herself in my absense. I think most nannies will find this a requirement in most nanny jobs. Perhaps you have more time to interact with the nanny than I do. But, if I was going to be home to manage her, then I wouldn't need a nanny, but a mother's help. And if that was the case, I would pay for a mother's help and not a nanny.

I think the point was more 20% don't need to be told, 20% need telling repeatedly and the rest need telling once to make the expectation clear. To me it's obvious I'm being paid to look after the children and not spend my life MNing. Equally if the child is at school, asleep or otherwise not in my care I don't see a problem with going on a PC or laptop. I don't go poking round documents, although have opened some things by accident, and tend to clear my browsing history so it's not cluttered when MB/DB switches it on and wants to find the site they were looking at the previous day. If they want to check what I was doing there are ways to get it back!

I think the key phrase was 'work with to set and achieve common goals' or something like that. That to me indicates the top lot are capable of something akin to mind reading and the bottom lot very obtuse.

Thanks Frakkin, you have put it better than I can.

if it helps, I have my own user name on the PC at work, which I use to surf t'internet when the baby is asleep - obviously, I don't look at porn lol, but MB quite frequently leaves her user name logged on so I have to switch users but I don't think it would even occur to her to be worried that I'd look at her personal stuff and/or spend the whole day on the PC because she trusts me to look after the most precious thing in her life so small things like this aren't a worry

excalty wwow - as i said in my 1st post it comes down to trust

if you think you can trust your nanny to look after your children, then you should be able to trust her not to look at porn

I take it it's only me then that thinks that what actually happened is that DB has been looking at porn and when MB found it he's just blamed it on the nanny?!

ha ha lollipop - though guess depends on what sex of porn

Interesting range of replies here! I do agree that everyone needs downtime and that we're all adults so there needs to be trust. I think that in my case I'll just let her use the computer on the children's account which has parental controls on it and just leave it at that.

LOL @ Lollipop - didn't think of that. She seemed very convincing in how she told it and I do know her pretty well, but you never know....