Now more than ever, companies are cracking down on employee behavior, as IT workers and managers monitor their fellow staff members. Many large scale companies are tracing behavior by not only filtering websites and scanning e-mail, but now they go as far as finding your exact location using the GPS function on your smart phone, collecting and retaining phone calls and text messages, and reviewing what one posts on a social network or blog. IT workers are doing the dirty work that has led to corporate scandals and firings due to leaking intellectual property or trade secrets, and violating laws on sexual harassment or child pornography.
It’s hard to take a definitive stand on either side of the argument here. While I think the company has the right to monitor its employees, they must understand their workers have rights too. For the IT staff especially, it takes away time from their normal routine to now babysit their co-workers to make sure nothing bad is happening. Most of the IT staff complains how uncomfortable they are with their policing position. I think it is necessary for the company to know how its employees act and what their normal behaviors are, but taking it to the next level like this article indicates is violating privacy and can turn many employees against each other. Employees know their company policies well enough; they know the risks involved when they go against these rules but to have them constantly monitored to ensure appropriate behavior is simply foolish because these employees could be concentrating on a much more productive task at hand.
Couldn’t it also just be a waste of time? Michael Workman, an associate professor at the Florida Institute of Technology who studies corporate IT security and employee behavior, estimates that monitoring responsibilities take up at least 20% of the average IT manager's time. Having one fifth of their day is spent snooping around at other people’s behaviors is ridiculous. It’s a complete waste of time, energy, and productivity just to see if someone is looking at an inappropriate website. Barry Thompson, network services manager at ENE Systems Inc. has been monitoring employee behavior for a long time. In the 10 years he's been with the company, Thompson says, he has officially reported inappropriate Internet usage to a supervisor on just two occasions. This example exemplifies the lunacy involved. IT money and time should be spent as part of a business strategy to improve company production not as a whistle blowing technique to get good employees fired.
This large-scale police system still has its bad guys. Since so many people are getting fired because of the monitoring, employees have taken notice and are working harder at not getting caught. "Our department philosophy is that if the users fear us, the job gets 10 times harder," says Dan Olson, IT director at Farstad Oil Inc., a Minot, N.D., company with 500 employees. Now that workers know they are being watched, they can either stop doing wasteful behavior or work hard to avoid trouble. I think that now that it makes it a harder job to catch the criminals it accentuates the fact of how wasteful of time this is. It’s turning companies against each other and pushing their attention away from productive means for the company. Only time will tell if employees change their daily routines or if company executives realize how foolish this policing can be.
-Michael Dolan
http://www.itnews.com/business-issues/23680/when-it-asked-spy?page=0,2
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