Reasons for Monitoring Employees

As we noted in the introduction, the tremendous growth of technology in the workplace has been a mixed bag for both the employer and the employees. First, there have been great changes in the way work is done. There have been remarkable benefits for employees, as we will see in the next section, and, of course, more benefits to the employers. New technologies like the Internet, for example, have brought businesses not only to new lands, but also to new customers. With new customers, demand went up, and production followed, which ended by bringing new wealth. With new wealth, employers brought in even newer technologies, and more employees retrained in the new skills these technologies demanded.

As employees acquired new skills and new technologies at the workplace, employers found, to their dismay, that it was not only production and profits that were going up. New technologies brought an array of problems that needed quick answers. An illustrative example of the magnitude of the problems faced by employers was given by John F. Kirch, Associate Editor of Security Management at TrueActive, a company that manufactures Internet monitoring software (Kirch, 2000). In the August 2000 issue of Security Management , Kirch describes a New York import-export company that grew rapidly with the new technologies and financial boom of the 1990s. However, in 1999, the company saw its profits nosedive, and they suspected that an internal person or persons were responsible. The investigations launched to find the root causes of the problem revealed that, indeed, two employees of the company, the head of the information technology department and the manager of the company s warehouse operations, were responsible for the nosedive. The two had siphoned out of the company coffers more than 3 million dollars (Kirch, 2000).

Indeed, research data support employee complicity in many companies security breaches. According to the 2002 survey by the CSI/FBI, 80% of respondents reported financial losses due to computer breaches. However, industry research indicates that 70% of all computer security breaches are from an internal job (TrueActive, 2000). There are other reported facts that employers look at as reasons to decide to monitor their employees. Among these facts are the following (WorkerWatch, 2000):

Although the number of employees with work online access capabilities is smaller than that of at-home users, the monthly average number of sessions of at-work accesses was higher at 41 compared to at-home access, which stood at 18 sessions.
Sixty-four percent of employees reported going online for personal reasons such as booking trips, finding education opportunities, doing research, and doing virtual shopping (Schulman, 2001a-d).
Over a third of employees with online access reported playing computer games at work.
A large fraction of employees also reported visiting sex and gambling sites at work.
Studies have shown that reducing at-work online gossip, jokes, and other unproductive activities does increase productivity.
Ninety-seven percent of employees surveyed believed that personal online access activities had no effect on their productivity (Panko, 2004).
Sixty-five percent of Human Resource (HR) departments surveyed had disciplined an employee for improper online usage (Panko, 2004).
Thirty percent of HR departments had fired an employee over illegal use of the Internet (Panko, 2004).

Because of these facts, together with the growing need for company security and many other reasons outlined below, strong employer monitoring of employees has become a by-product and a counter-force of the Internet technology in the workplace.

In fact, according to the McWorld 1993 survey, employers are responding and monitoring a variety of employee activities as follows (Schulman, 2001a-d).

29.2% monitor for productivity . Many employers believe that employees spend a lot of time doing their own thing while at work. A number of studies support this view. According to Panko (Panko, 2004), in a PC World 2001 study, 60% of the employees surveyed said that they send personal e-mails and surf the Internet while at work. Further, 90% of the respondents said that they spend at least 30 minutes a day surfing the Internet. Although companies are tolerant of moderate Internet use during working hours, excessive use results in poor performance, and hence, reduced productivity. So, to respond to any excessive Internet activities at work, companies routinely monitor employee e- mails and Internet use.
29.2% monitor for theft of company property .
21.5% monitor for espionage . It is common for employees to deliberately or unconsciously acquire information from or give information to other companies. In a 2001 survey, 40% of the respondents admitted to receiving confidential information about other companies. According to Panko (2004), this was a 356% increase over 1999. Information received or given to competitors has the potential to damage a company s competitive advantage. To prevent this, companies usually prohibit their employees from uploading or downloading information without specific permission. Along the same line, e-mails are usually forbidden. Employers have to monitor employees to enforce this prohibition .
9.2% monitor for performance review of an employee.
6.2% monitor to prevent harassment between supervisors and employees and among employees. Since Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits sexual and racial harassment, companies are prone to lawsuits when any harassment cases arise. Based on a 1999 survey by Elron Software, 64% of adults who send or receive e-mails at work said that they sent or received adult-oriented e-mails (Schulman, 2001a-d). Such suits usually not only result in huge financial damages, but they also tarnish the name and reputation of the company. So, if harassment is to be avoided, employees must be monitored , as well as all downloaded Web contents and in and out e-mail messages.
3.1% monitor to find missing data , assuming that employees may have it.
3.1% monitor to find illegal software on company computers put on by employees for their personal use. Since employees have a tendency to bring in personal software on disks or downloaded off questionable Web sites or FTP sites, employers fear that such software could bring with it viruses into the company system which may result in expensive handling for the company. To reduce the chances of this ever happening, employers prohibit personal software and downloads on company computers. To enforce this, employers monitor all incoming and outgoing traffic and sometimes individual employees.
3.1% monitor to prevent personal use of company computers for unproductive activities by employees.

So far, in many countries , the law is still in favour of the employer. In the USA, for example, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) exclusively prohibits the interception of electronic communications in transition and after it has been received, but the ECPA also takes away what it gives in two ways:

The service provider may read messages; for example, since in many areas the company may be the service provider for the internal mail system, HTTP, and FTP, an employer is free to read employee mail.
Reading electronic traffic is not prohibited if the user gives consent. Companies circumvent this by requiring this consent as a condition for hiring employees.

In many countries, monitoring in the workplace is legal whenever it is required for business purposes. For example, according to Sue Nickson, although the Telecommunications Regulation 2000 in the UK provides that an employer take reasonable steps to inform the employee when such an employee is being monitored, the employer retains the right to monitor an employee without employee consent, as long as the monitoring is done for one of the following reasons (Nickson, 2002):

Recording evidence of a business transaction.
Ensuring compliance with regulatory or self-regulatory guidelines.
Maintaining the effective operations of the employer s system.
Maintaining standards of training and service.
Preventing or detecting criminal activities.
Preventing unauthorized use of the workplace technologies.