Introduction

Substantial developments in workplace technology over the past two decades have dramatically transformed today s workplaces. Production rates have gone up tremendously, but the upswing in production and convenience in the workplace has come with heavy employee monitoring and diminishing employee privacy. A report from the Workplace Surveillance Project of the Privacy Foundation, which monitors employee monitoring worldwide, shows that globally 35% of the 100 million online workforce are monitored . This compares well with the reported 27% of the 40 million online employees in the USA (Schulman, 2001). Other organizations, like the American Management Association (AMA), are reporting similar figures. According to the AMA, there has been a noted steady increase in employee monitoring. For example, in 1997, 15% of all surveyed companies reported monitoring their employees . By 2001, according to the AMA, that number had risen to 46%. During the same period, AMA reported that the monitoring of files on computers had risen from 14% to 36% (Panko, 2004).

Employee monitoring is a dependable, capable, and very affordable process of electronically or otherwise recording all employee activities at work and also increasingly outside the workplace. The Internet and its associated technologies have accelerated the monitoring processes, substantially making them more evasive and intrusive .

In this chapter we are going to look at the factors influencing employee monitoring, reasons for monitoring, technologies employed by employers , deployment of monitoring technologies, effects of monitoring on employees, ways employees can protect themselves against monitoring, and monitoring beyond the company gates ” the government role.