Your company provided you a laptop which can be used at home. Say you are using it to watch movies on Netflix. Should your company be able to track which movies you saw? Perhaps you do much of your work on a company-provided iPad. Should your company be allowed to track the Facebook posts you make on it in your off-hours?
Privacy in the tech age
Thomas Claburn, editor-at-large with InformationWeek, recently tackled the controversy over employee monitoring in a recent online feature. In it, he quoted a wide array of experts, all of whom could see why employers would like to use new tech to monitor their employees. However, these experts also contended that too much monitoring is counterproductive.
More to come?
That’s because today’s technology allows employers to monitor anything from where their employees are during the day – thanks to smart phones and GPS – to what Web sites they’re visiting to what e-mail messages they’re sending. Employers do this for a variety of reasons; they don’t want their employees to humiliate them on social media sites. They would like to make sure that their employees aren’t visiting TMZ during working hours. The question is: Does this monitoring pay off for companies?
Mixed opinions
The opinions by the experts quoted by Claburn are a mixed bag. These experts say that some monitoring of employees is reasonable, but other techniques are not. For instance, employers shouldn’t monitor their workers’ locations when these workers are off duty. Possibly the most sage advice in the story? Those companies who trust their employees tend to be rewarded with workers who are harder-working and more loyal.