The continuous advancement of technological tools has made it possible to measure and monitor employees’ activities at the workplace, which has never been possible before. It is happening due to fundamental changes in how employees work at business organizations, the rise of privacy concerns, and the specter of a lack of monitoring in the workplace. Today, employers can perform unblinking eye tracking of employees using contemporary tech tools. Moreover, companies worldwide know that workers would be more productive if they had social interactions even, and digital monitoring of workforce behavior worries privacy advocates. On the other hand, business organizations have a couple of legal obligations apart from the employees’ consent, which means 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 closely tracking employees’ activities regularly, and employers have further terminated offender employees when they get caught red-handed. However, an employee has been terminated based on violating the company’s policy or getting involved in something fishy using the company’s or personal cell phones and computer machines. Let’s discuss the percentage of companies that terminated employees when they go against the policies.
Stats Says:
- Due to inappropriate browsing activities, terminated employees –26%
- Due to inappropriate emails sent/received by terminated employees –26%
- Time-wasting activities on cell phones terminated employees –6%
- Instant messaging on company-owned devices terminated employees –4%
- Use of social media apps on company-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 Is Workplace Surveillance On The Rise?
Since business organizations function via voice and videos, they converge on IP–based networks. Corporate infractions are happening online these days. Therefore, leakage of business intellectual property, habits of goldbricking, and leakage of company’s trade secrets, no matter if it occurs purposely or incidentally.
When employees seem hard at work, it violates the company’s policies. As a result, employers have to prevent all these activities to protect their business, and they usually tend towards legal and compliance requirements.
Employers these days filter and block websites and monitor employees’ emails on the company’s laptop and desktop computer devices. In addition, employers are keeping a hidden eye on employees’ social media apps and websites, blogs, and other activities, especially at the workplace during working hours.
Furthermore, business executives collect and retain cell phone calls, incoming or outgoing, and text messages sent/received. Strangely, employers are also interested in tracking employees’ physical location using smartphone GPS location tracker apps.
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 your workforce becomes dirty when you constantly track your employee’s activity, especially without obtaining their consent. Moreover, gathering personal data to protect your business secrets without making a written agreement with your employees harms employees’ morale. Therefore, employees must have written consent and introduce the company’s policy during recruitment.
Otherwise, business executives are breaching employees’ privacy in the name of protection and violating the law under the Cybercrime Act. Though companies keep an eye on employees who are more likely to require the security of their assets, the nature and intensity of the employees’ tracking are based on how the company keeps hidden employees’ activities. On the other hand, if you are doing dirty work in the name of employee monitoring in terms of tracking their personal belongings, 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 in plenty of ways. Nowadays, business executives are using hidden phone and PC trackers, time tracking apps, and plenty of other apps that allow employers to keep tabs on every activity employees have done at the workplace. On the other hand, keeping your workforce under constant monitoring also affects employee morale, which affects many things. Let’s discuss how spying on employees’ data affects their efficiency.
Reduce Performance
Digital dirty work, in terms of breaching employees’ privacy with the use of monitoring tools, will affect the performance of the employees. Employees will always be insecure, considering that their personal calls, text messages, and social networking content are being monitored. Therefore, don’t use employee monitoring to breach their privacy; monitor their productivity or prevent activities that can harm your business.
Stress in Employees
When employees learn that they are being monitored for all their activities, they may think about the things they have done for personal reasons. Because no one is willing to reveal their activities, they won’t be able to concentrate on their assigned tasks. Ultimately, employees start lacking productivity.
Prevails Identical Working Habits Among Employees
The constant workplace surveillance, especially in digital dirty work, prevails 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 to quantity rather than quantity rather than creating skilled or creative work.
Lack of Moral & Turnover
Employee morale will decrease because spying on your employees negatively makes them feel detached and devalued. However, it is common that feeling downgraded by employees reduces their productivity, may cause them to become disgruntled, and may end their tolerance. Therefore, always try to impose employee monitoring within limits and make your employees feel comfortable.
How Workplace Surveillance Done Right?
There are several ways to protect your business at work without breaching the privacy of your employees. Let’s discuss the tips that you need to apply to the fullest extent in order to track your employees without going beyond the limits.
- Introduce the limits of internet usage policy, obtain written consent, and further use a spy app for Windows and MAC for browsing activities and blocking inappropriate time-wasting websites.
- Monitor emails sent or received emails on the company’s owned devices
- Record live screen activities of your company’s owned cell phones, laptops, and desktop computer machines
- Use a data backup app to retreat all the lost data due to any employee activity
- Monitor IMs running on the company’s owned devices that you have previously discussed with your employees
- Use mighty alarms of computer monitoring software to prevent phishing or unauthorized activities to catch dishonest employees
- Use the keystrokes logging tool to get your hands on the particular keystrokes applied by your employees that can harm your business. You can monitor using 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 to know whether employees are on their seats or not. Moreover, you can record the surround sounds and conversations on the company’s devices to understand what your employees are talking about behind your back. Remember, don’t use tracking tools for computers to breach your employees’ personal belongings, especially in terms of employees’ devices.
Conclusion:
Workplace surveillance is necessary to protect your business and measure productivity. However, no one has the right to breach someone’s privacy, including employees, apart from their activities on the company’s computer devices. Further, you can ban the use of personal cell phones and gadgets at the workplace.
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