The continuous advancement of technological tools have made possible to measure and monitor the employee’s activities at workplace no time ever before. It is happening in accordance with fundamental change how employees are working at business organizations and alongside the rise and the rise of concerns of privacy and the specter of lack of monitoring in the workplace. Today, employers can perform unblinking eyes track employees with the use of contemporary tech –tools. Moreover, companies worldwide are well –known that workers would be more productive if they have social interactions even than digital monitoring of workforce behavior worriers’ privacy advocates. On the other hand, business organizations have a couple of legal obligations apart from the consent of the employees that they are under constant monitoring.
Questions arise, workplace surveillance is digital dirty work or not, Lee Tien, a senior lawyer at Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
Termination of Employees Due to Workplace Surveillance: [Stats]
Corporation’s accountability on digital offender employees
The corporate sector worldwide appears to be tracking employees activities constantly at regular basis closely, and employers have further terminated the offender employees when get caught red handed. However, an employee has been terminated on the basis of violating the company’s policy or get involved in something fishy using company’s owned or personal cell phones and computer machines. Let’s discuss the percentage of companies that terminated their employees when they go against the policies.
Stats Says:
- Due to in appropriate browsing activities terminated employees –26%
- Due to in appropriate emails sent/received terminated employees –26%
- Time wasting activities on cell phones terminated employees –6%
- Instant messaging on company’s owned devices terminated employees –4%
- Use of social media apps on company’s owned devices –2%
- Multimedia sharing such as videos and photos within the working hours -1%
- Use Personal blogs & corporate blogs terminated employees -1%
Moreover, almost 13% of companies’ survey said that they used seeing candidate’s job application social networking websites or personal blogs as a crucial part of the interview. However, 3% reported they have not to recruit applicants due to content posted on such type of websites.
Why Workplace Surveillance Is On The Rise?
Since the business organizations are functioning via Voice, videos, converge on an IP –based networks. The corporate infractions are happening these days online. Therefore, leakage of business intellectual property, habits of goldbricking, leakage of company’s trade secrets no mater it happens purposely or incidentally.
It is the violation of the company’s policies while employees seem looking like hard at work. Resultantly, employers have to prevent all these activities in order to protect their business and they usually tend towards the legal and compliance requirements.
The employers these days are filtering and blocking websites and monitor emails of employees on company’s laptop and desktop computer devices. In addiction employers are also keeping a hidden eye in employee’s social media apps and websites, blogs, and others activities especially at workplace within the working hours.
Furthermore, business executives are collecting and retaining cell phone calls incoming or outgoing and text messages sent/received. Strangely, employers are also interested of tracking employee’s physical location using GPS location tracker app on smartphones.
It is not necessary these ask for workplace surveillance kinda digital dirty work to the IT workers that are known as a specialist, it is quite common these days to get the job done to perform monitoring on the workforce, Nancy Flynn, executive director of ePolicy Institute. However, industry observers are agreed on the point that workplace surveillance has become a bigger part of IT sector these days.
“Workplace monitoring of employees is taking at least 20% of average IT employer’s time”, Michael Workman, the associate professor Florida Institute of Technology’s Nathan M. Bisk College of Business said that.
When Workplace Surveillance Becomes Digital Dirty Work:
Monitoring of your workforce becomes dirty when you are applying constant tracking on your employees each and every single activity especially without taking their consent. Moreover, gathering of personal data on the name of the protection of your business secrets without making a written agreement with your employees leaves bad emotional effects on employees moral. Therefore, employees need to have written consent and should introduce the company’s policy at the time of the recruitment.
Otherwise, business executives are breaching employee’s privacy on the name of protection and obviously doing a violation of law that comes under the cyber-crime act. Though companies keep an eye on employees more likely for the security of their assets, the nature and intensity of the employees tracking based on the way the company is keeping hidden employees activities. On the other hand, if you are doing dirty work on the name of employee monitoring in terms of tracking of their personal belongings that you are affecting employees well –being, work culture, creativity, and motivation.
Workplace Surveillance As Digital Dirty Work: Effects on Employees
Employee tracking is possible these days through plenty of ways. Nowadays, business executives are using the hidden phone and PC tracker, time tracking apps, and plenty of other kinds of apps that allow employers to keep tabs on each and every single activity employees have done at the workplace. On the other hand, keeping your workforce under constant monitoring also affects employee’s moral that really affects plenty of things. Let’s talk about how spying on employees personal data affects their efficiency and other things.
Reduce Performance
Digital dirty work in terms of breaching employee’s privacy with the use of monitoring tools will affect the performance of the employees. Employees will always insecure having a view in mind that their personal calls, text messages and social networking content being monitored. Therefore, don’t use the employee monitoring for the sake of breaching their privacy, but to monitor their productivity or to prevent activities that can harm your business.
Stress in Employees
When employees got to know that there all the activities are being monitored by the employees, they may think about the things they have done for personal reasons. Because no one is willing to unveil their personal activities and they further won’t be able to concentrate on their assigned tasks at all. Ultimately, employees start lacking productivity.
Prevails Identical Working Habits Among Employees
The constant workplace surveillance, especially in terms of digital dirty work, prevail in similar working habits. Because employees know that employers are watching their activities in real –time and they have to produce productive work. So, they turned themselves in quantity rather than quantity rather than creating skilled or creative work.
Lack of Moral & Turnover
In a nutshell, employees moral will get down, because spying your employees negatively make them feel detached and devalued. However, it is common that feeling downside employees reduce their productivity and they may be turned disgruntled and their personal tolerance come to an end. Therefore, always try to impose employee monitoring within limits and make your employee feel comfortable.
How Workplace Surveillance Done Right?
There is the number of ways that you can apply at the workplace in order to protect your business without breaching the privacy of your employees. Let’s discuss the tips that you need to apply to the fullest in order to track your employees without going beyond the limits.
- Introduce the limits of internet usage policy and take written consent and further use spy app for windows and MAC for browsing activities and to block in appropriate time wasting websites
- Monitor emails sent or received emails on company’s owned devices
- Record live screen activities of your company’s owned cell phones, laptop and desktop computer machines
- Use data backup app in order to retreat all the lost data due to any employee activity
- Monitor IM’s running on the company’s owned devices that you have priory discussed with your employees
- Use mighty alarms of computer monitoring software to prevent phishing or unauthorized activities to catch dishonest employees
- Use keystrokes logging tool to get your hands on the particular keystrokes applied by your employees that can harm your business. You can monitor use of weak passwords, email content and text messages to monitor messenger installed on the company’s devices
- Monitor the front camera of your company’s owned laptop machines in order to know whether employees are on their seats are not. Moreover, you can record the surround sounds and conversations on the company’s owned devices in order to know what your employees are talking about behind your back. Remember; don’t use the tracking tools for computers in order to breach your employee’s personal belongings especially in terms of employee’s personal devices.
Conclusion:
Workplace surveillance is without the shadow of the doubt is necessary, but to protect your business and to measure productivity. However, no one has the right to breach someone’s privacy including employees apart from the activities they are doing on the company’s owned computer devices. Further. You can ban the use of personal cell phones and gadgets at the workplace.
