Who is watching you?

Interesting article in the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times that looked at how employers are monitoring employee behavior at work.

According to 2005 data from the American Management Association:

75% of companies monitor internet use

50% review employees' computer files

50% monitor time spent on phone and track numbers

8% use GPS to track vehicles

26% have fired employees for internet misuse

51% use cameras, up from 33% in 2001

And one former HR manager, who worked 30 years for corporations (but declined to give her name) said, "Seven out of 10 times, when a company wants to get rid of someone, they will find something in their cell phone bills or travel expenses."

My thoughts:

• If employers are going to monitor employees, they should do a better job communicating what they are doing. Use monitoring as a way to review policies and ethical guidelines. Managers often assume employees know what they can and can't do - THIS IS PLAIN WRONG. Many employees, particularly those of the younger generation, assume that what they do at home is perfectly acceptable at work.
• There is a line between protecting your business and just being creepy. If an organization needs to resort to incredibly restrictive measures in order to get employees to be productive, they may want to reconsider the type of employees they are hiring.
• Organizations should have a reason for monitoring - Mandated security or regulations, aggressive tactics from competitors, etc. - it should not be the default behavior. Success in today's information environment is largely dependant on the aibility of individuals to develop relationships and build networks. Restrictive behaviors limit behaviors that lead to innovation.

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Technorati Tags: privacy, employee, monitoring

Comments

[hollyster]

To your second point, rather than reconsidering the employees they hire, I would probably also ask organizations to reconsider the type of office culture they are cultivating. Suspicion breeds fear, and fear can be very paralyzing. What do you think?

[Jeffrey Treem]

Great point!

Cultures where employees are hesitant to take action for fear of the consequences limit the contributions that employees can make.

In the employee engagement world, we love to talk about discretionary effort as the Holy Grail, but when employees are restricted to a finite set of behaviors that is all you will get - nothing more, and quite possibly a lot less.

[Maureen Rogers]

I'm afraid we're going to see more of this invasion of your privacy snatching for a couple of reasons. One, the technology to measure/spy on everything is in place - IM's, bio breaks, you name it. At the same time, the lines of division between work and personal time are blurring. If we're checking e-mails from home at 3 a.m., then we're probably going to feel free to IM a friend about dinner plans while at work.

I completely agree with your points that companies have to communicate their policies to their employees, and that all this no-real-reason monitoring is creepy. It's also over the top. There's a company called Xobni that lets companies monitor and analyze e-mail usage to see, among other things, who wastes too much time on e-mail. You know what? As a manager, I'm probably going to be able to figure out who's a time-waster without having to comb through their e-mail usage patterns.

[matt]

I am a co-founder of Xobni. Email is very personal and we are considerate of that fact as we build our software.

We are making an individual tool that helps people understand their own email usage patterns. It is better to empower individuals than use a corporate stick.

In the corporate setting we aren't making software to let your boss bust you for writing emails to your friends. Companies have found that allowing people to write personal emails actually *increase* productivity. Companies are instead interested in how attentive their sales team is to customers or what the response times are between the Tokyo and London offices.

Learn about us and how we are improving email on our blog http://www.xobni.com/blog