Spread of Surveillance Technology Threaten

¶ … Spread of Surveillance Technology Threaten Privacy?

Employee surveillance can take many forms: requiring employees to punch a time clock, monitoring and limiting the Internet sites they can surf at work or at its most extreme, watching workers 24/7 on surveillance cameras. Drug tests are another way employees are monitored for bad behavior in some occupations.

However, the use of employee surveillance creates a culture of mistrust between workers and management. Instead of constantly looking for the best monitoring software at their disposal, employers would be better served to ask why they feel such a need to keep such close watch upon employees in the first place. Instead of a place where they are assumed to be adults, where their contribution is valued, workers under surveillance are likely to feel as though they are being treated like children. Is a monitored worker likely to make a suggestion to a manager about improving processes at work, if he or she feels as though the corporation is constantly holding its breath, assumes that he or she is a thief or is simply waiting for him or her to make a mistake?

Of course, there is the argument that unmonitored workers may use the corporate Internet for personal issues if they are not monitored -- even running their own 'side businesses on eBay! However, merely by blocking offensive sites on the organization's Intranet, some monitoring can be exercised without directly 'snooping' into worker's emails and minute-to-minute use of the Internet. Regarding drug use, while drug monitoring of some high-profile professions may be required for liability concerns and safety reasons, like that of a school bus driver or air traffic controller, in most cases drug testing is simply the employer peeping into the employee's private life, and so long as the employee's work is not compromised, it is an unneeded and unwelcome (as well as a costly, and time-wasting) intrusion. Drug tests can also be inaccurate, and show false positives, and are ineffective for more dangerous 'hard' drugs that have a shorter half-life in the body than 'soft' drugs like marijuana.

Many extremely successful companies do not use employee workplace surveillance such as Google. Google's corporate philosophy is to keep employees happy at work. So what if a productive employee updates his or her Facebook page at 3pm, but stays late, and is productive, while emailing his or her coworkers in ways that blend social life and corporate chat? For the new generation, barriers between personal and work life are more permeable. Also, when more employers expect workers to do work at home, it is frustrating to be barred from doing even the most minor personal business at work, and being taken to task for 'time theft.'

Better not to hire employees you do not trust, than use top-of-the-line workplace surveillance. No surveillance techniques will be perfect, and good employees penalized for minor infractions will only want to leave the company. The use of such technology assumes that the employee wants to do as little as possible, with as little ethics as possible. When given a choice the employee will leave the company for a place where he or she is not constantly monitored. Productivity and quality of work are the appropriate methods of judging workers, not constant watchfulness.