Your company’s Web-use policy is usually a collaborative effort that includes legal counsel, IT expertise, HR insight and executive oversight. When top level managers give Web policies a review, it’s important to keep in mind a careful balance …between protecting the company’s interests and keeping users happy and productive.

It’s a delicate balance.

Trust is important to today’s employees. In fact, 79% say that, aside from job role and salary, the most important thing in a job is being trusted to manage their own time and workload, including being trusted to use the Internet the way they want.

That’s according to recent survey of 1,200 employees and managers in the U.S. and Europe by security firm Clearswift.

The desire for independence extends to employees’ views on using sites like Facebook and Twitter at work — 62% of employees feel they should be allowed to access social networking sites at work.

And more than half (51%) of their managers agree.

Perhaps most surprisingly, 21% of employees said they would actually turn down a job if they felt the company’s web policies were too strict.

Experts recommend that organizations avoid strictly forbidding or physical blocking sites, instead relying on monitoring web use and working with managers to deal with productivity problems as they come up.

Also, periodically have your IT folks remind employees that their computer use is being watched. This can go a long way toward stopping problematic web browsing.