Factors Fueling the Growth of Employee Monitoring

The growing rate of employee monitoring can be attributed to the availability of tools to do it, the ease of setting up of these tools, the growing use of Internet access in the workplace, and the growing availability of monitoring software and hardware products.

Andrew Schulman (2001a-d) reports that worldwide sales of employee monitoring products like software are skyrocketing, reaching sales of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars a year. In fact, Wensense, a monitoring software company and one of the big eight monitoring software developers that also include Baltimore MIMEsweeper, SurfControl, Symantec I-Gear, Elron Internet Manager, Tumbleweed MMS, N2H2, and Telemate, reported a growth rate of around 33% per year in 2000. In the same year, Baltimore MIMEsweeper reported a net increase of 80%.

There are over 50 different products available today that can be used by anyone who wants to monitor anyone else, including employers monitoring employees , parents monitoring nannies and day care workers, and spouses monitoring spouses.

Several other factors contributing to the growth of employee monitoring include:

1. The plummeting prices of both software and hardware, which are bringing the technology within reach of many employers who could not otherwise afford them. In fact, the so-called return to vendor ratio, that is, the average price per monitored employee, is coming down drastically.

2. The miniaturization of monitoring products, which is making it possible to conceal them, thus making employee monitoring less controversial .

3. The increasing use of Internet and e-mail technology in the workplace, which is making employee access to these technologies more widespread and, therefore, more likely to be abused and misused.

4. The ever increasing user-friendliness of the e-mail and Internet user interfaces, which is enabling the average employer to use the technologies without much difficulty.

5. Employers changing workplace management styles from the old-over-the-shoulder styles that encourage spot checks to new less intrusive , small, team-based styles.

6. Employers believing that monitored employees are more productive than unmonitored ones.

The tremendous amount of new powerful spying and surveillance software that is all encompassing in what it does in gathering information.