The article “snopping bosses” (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1531312,00.html) takes up exactly that dilemma.
According to the article 76% of the bosses spy on their employees Internet habits (1996), that is scary. What kind of boss has such a miss trust to his employees that he needs to check their e-mails?
One boss on a surveillance company had GPS trackers in his employees work phones to monitor their routes. Using this he could see exactly where the employee were and even how fast they were driving. So far the boss used the GPS to make his workers more effective but when one worker called in sick he tracked the workers phone and found out that he wasn’t sick at home at all, busted!
This boss had at least told his employees that he monitored them but many bosses doesn’t.
Another boss wondered what one of his employees were doing on the Internet. He checked the Internet history and found out that he was checking a hard corn-porno site, doing research for his escort service. He got fired on the spot. This employer didn’t check what his employee was doing before his productivity started to drop but many employers check everything.
Some even hired personnel to monitor their employees e-mail. Checking for jokes about the boss, inappropriate content and much more. In my opinion that is only paranoia.
Whether the employer do it to make your employees more productive or from plain paranoia should it really be legal to spy on your employees. At some work places i can understand surveillance for instance the military, law enforcement and other occupations that handles classified information, but they still sould’t be allowed to monitor everything they do. Everyone need some kind of personal life, their boss can’t control their everything they do even if they want to. If a boss feel the need to spy on their employees the least he can do is tell them and get something good out of it. The employees at the surveillance company had a choice, if they didn’t want their boss to now where they were they could just leave their phone at home, many employees sadly hasn’t that opportunity.
In some workplaces the bosses blocks specific websites like Internet communities and e-mail sites. That sounds very much like when they blocked “lunarstorm” and msn in primary school.
Some surveillance in the workplace is good, makes the the work more efficient but the bosses can’t control everything only because of superstition.
