What Effects Does Monitoring Have on Employees?
Many critics have accused employers of substituting electronic monitoring for effective management. They allege that any temporary increase in productivity or security brought about by EM are more than offset by a decrease in quality and customer service resulting from increased employee stress and job dissatisfaction. There have been several studies undertaken which tend to support these allegations, at least as regards to the production environment. These studies have generally concluded that electronic monitoring does often increase the stress levels of production workers to the point of inducing physical problems such as headache, back and neck pain, severe fatigue and exhaustion, etc., sometimes resulting in lost work time. Some studies found that monitored employees tended to exaggerate the importance of the monitoring beyond what the employer intended and, as a result, in an attempt to be perceived as efficient, production quality was often sacrificed for quantity. Amongst customer service employees, it was found that the more difficult, time-consuming customer inquiries were often shelved or bandied about among several employees. It would not, however, be valid to infer from these studies that electronic monitoring in an organization for the purpose of preventing computer and telephone abuse, theft and pilferage, unauthorized entry to facilities or use of equipment and illegal activity would promote the same levels of employee stress as production monitoring (16).
Other criticisms of electronic monitoring invoke basic psychological principles such as pyschological reactance; the tendency of people to do what you tell them not to do and self-fulfilling prophecy, which simply means that people will behave pretty much as you expect them to. Both these principles are tied together with the concept of the trust relationship between employer and employee. Critics of EM point out that organizations who claim they value "strong trust relationships" with their employees should consider what they are saying about those relationships when they monitor every keystroke (10).
Even strong critics of electronic monitoring admit that in certain circumstances it has value. However, such employee advocacy groups as the National Workrights Institute insist that employers are far too eager to embrace this technology as a panacea without carefully evaluating the need for it and exploring more balanced and often less costly alternatives. The NWI offers four suggestions to employers considering the implementation of electronic monitoring:
- Businesses should properly train managers and supervisors to deal with employee issues and problems. Most businesses do not have managers that are properly trained to deal with sensitive employee subjects. These staffs need to be observant and reactive to employee needs. Properly trained managers are a company's best asset in terms of dealing directly with and correcting many of the concerns that prompt the adoption of electronic monitoring practices. Supervising staffs can set conduct guidelines, address concerns, mediate complaints, as well as monitor and deal individually with those employees that choose to abuse company resources.
- Businesses should always conduct an in-house assessment to identify whether electronic monitoring is even necessary. This seems like an obvious point, but many businesses adopt large scale monitoring programs on the assumption that they will add benefits to their workplace without identifying their own specific requirements and whether the adoption of an electronic monitoring program would meet those requirements.
- Often employers adopt random, across the board monitoring programs that are overbroad and unnecessary to meet their specific demands. They need to be much more discriminating. Once a business decides that they want to adopt an electronic monitoring program for one or more specific purposes, they should work to both limit the type and extent of their monitoring practices to the degree necessary to meet that objective.
- If a company does choose to adopt a program of electronic monitoring, proper notice should be given well in advance of any monitoring practices. This notice should explicitly state what would be monitored as well as when this monitoring would occur. The American Management Association has recommended that employer's give notice of electronic monitoring since 1997 (11).
A Harris Interactive Survey taken in April of 2002 suggests that employees may not be nearly so adverse to security monitoring in the wake of 9/11 as privacy advocacy groups have suggested. In this survey of 1,258 full-time and part-time workers in private, government and non-profit sectors, 81% of respondents said "they would be willing to have an ID card issued by their employer that would have on it their photo, basic personnel information, and a biometric identifier, such as a fingerprint, to enhance workplace security. 81% of respondents do not believe their employer monitors their work in a way they consider improper, while 76% consider their employer's "privacy rules and practices" to be pretty good to excellent. A majority of respondents felt that their employers should be strengthening ID procedures for entering premises and accessing computer systems and doing more detailed background checks on prospective job applicants. In the summary of this survey, no mention was given as to whether employees were surveyed about their attitudes toward Internet or email monitoring (17).
Whatever one's position on electronic monitoring in the workplace, it is obvious that it is a phenomenon that it is here for the duration and has become a significant factor in job security. The table below lists some of the high-profile cases in recent years where employees were fired or reprimanded for computer misuse, uncovered as a result of electronic monitoring:
It Could Mean Your Job More than one-quarter of American companies have fired employees for misuse of office e-mail or Internet connections, and 65 percent report taking disciplinary actions for similar offenses.
October 1999 - Xerox dismisses 40 workers for inappropriate use of the Internet related to the viewing of pornographic Web sites.
December 1999 - The New York Times fires 23 employees for distributing pornographic images via e-mail.
July 2000 - Dow Chemical fires 50 workers and disciplines 200 others for distributing sexually explicit and violent material.
September 2000 - Dow fires another 24 and reprimands 235 more for e-mailing sexually explicit or violent material.
September 2000 - Orange, a British mobile-phone company, fires 40 employees for downloading pornography.
November 2000 - The Central Intelligence Agency fires four employees and reprimands 18 for participating in a secret chat room created in a classified computer system for exchanging jokes.
June 2001 - A junior-high principal in Seattle is fired for allegedly viewing inappropriate material on school-district-owned computers.
July 2001 - Northwestern University fires an employee for allegedly storing thousands of MP3 files on her work computer.
January 2002 - Enron fires several employees for posting information about financial abuses in online message boards.
Before definitive conclusions can be reached as to the efficacy and desirability of electronic monitoring, additional research is needed on its effects as a security and behavior monitoring tool on workplace environment, employee morale and overall organizational productivity. A joint effort by business and privacy advocate groups is needed to produce model workplace privacy legislation. The results of this collaboration should provide lawmakers with a truly workable template for laws that both sides can live with and benefit from. Congress must approach the matter from a bipartisan viewpoint, soliciting input from all effected groups; establishing common ground and drawing discernible limits. Human beings, not the security and monitoring industry must decide what will be the limits of our tolerance. The real danger to our society will be if the technologies of monitoring and surveillance are allowed to grow and evolve checked only by the exigencies of the marketplace.
