Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace: An Overview

This section of the chapter provides an overview of the issues associated with electronic surveillance. After reviewing the parameters of surveillance and explaining the workplace focus of this chapter, the final part of this section discusses the extent, forms, and effects of electronic surveillance.

Parameters

The popular press often uses the terms surveillance and monitoring inter-changeably. However, the research literature has identified conceptual differences between the two terms (Botan & McCreadie, 1993). The term monitoring is generic and applicable to all automated collecting of information about work, regardless of purpose. Monitoring produces information used for everything from setting bonuses and keeping track of inventory to controlling individual employees . Surveillance , on the other hand, more narrowly refers to a relationship between some authority and those whose behavior it wishes to control (Rule & Brantley, 1992).

Monitoring generates the information used in surveillance, and surveillance incorporates monitoring, but there are many uses for monitoring that do not involve surveillance. For example, the thermostats in our homes monitor temperature but are almost never used for surveillance, just as the anti-lock brake system on many cars monitors for wheel-spin but is almost never used for surveillance. We include the almost never caveat because, in the computer age, whenever the automated collection of information exists there is at least the potential for surveillance. For example, although far- fetched , some modern electronic thermostats have a limited recall function so they can be used to discover when, and therefore potentially who, made changes in the settings and how big those changes were. Similarly, several auto manufacturers now install tiny black boxes in cars that can record speed just before an accident as well as level of impact. These could presumably be used to record feedback from the anti-lock monitors as well.

Workplace

So when is monitoring most used for surveillance? Probably in the workplace. As Botan and McCreadie explained in 1993, surveillance is more pervasive in the workplace than in other sectors of society for at least three reasons. First, today s information society is epitomized by an economy in which information handling plays a leading role. As a result, workplaces are pre-wired for information technologies that have surveillance potential, making surveillance quicker and easier than it would be without such pre-wiring . Second, surveillance procedures that would not be cost-effective in some other contexts are in the workplace, largely because of economies of scale. Third, the doctrine of employment at will, which is based on the idea that the employer had the right to set virtually any condition of employment for those who accept his [sic] wages , and to fire any worker for any reason (Donnelly, 1986, pp. 218-219), provides employers with the legal freedom and ideological justification to carry out surveillance.

Extent of Electronic Surveillance

During the past two decades workplace surveillance has been steadily on the rise (Aiello, 1993; Botan, 1996), and its frequency is still increasing. The last in a multi-year series of surveys by the American Management Association (AMA, 2001) found that over 82% of major U.S. firms had engaged in some form of electronic surveillance the year before. This number had increased from 78% in 2000 and from 67% in 1999. This increase is due, in part, to rapid advances in technology. In earlier times, surveillance was limited to the information that a supervisor could observe and record firsthand and to primitive counting devices. In the computer age surveillance can be instantaneous, unblinking, cheap, and, maybe most importantly, easy.

While almost all jobs have the potential to be subject to some type of surveillance, some are much more susceptible than others. These can range from the office worker whose e-mail the supervisor reads to the grocery store cashier whose bar code scanner records not just price and inventory information, but the speed at which items are moved across the scanner. The next section provides an account of the types of jobs most likely to be under electronic surveillance.

Who is Surveilled?

As far back as the late 1980s, government studies (U.S. Congress, 1987) established that particular kinds of jobs are especially susceptible to surveillance, including data processing, word processing, and customer service telephone operators. These tasks are especially easy to surveil because of links to computers and the fact that they produce quantitatively measured results. For instance, today it is easy for a supervisor in a phone bank operation to count the number of calls that all workers answer and to rank the performance of each worker based on how their speed compares to the mean, the top 10%, or some other norm. Indeed, as information technology becomes integral to more workplaces, it also becomes easier for even untrained or inexperienced supervisors to acquire such evaluative information, sometimes with a single mouse click. Indeed, as far as we have been able to find, there have been no scholarly research efforts addressing the question of competence or training for those charged with receiving and using the results of surveillance, and we think this might be a very fruitful area of research, both critical and empirical.

These older government studies supported the already popularly held view that surveillance affects men and women differentially because, at least at that time, most surveilled jobs were in fields where women predominated, including clerical, lower level professional fields (e.g., data entry and office-level programming), and customer service. This analysis applied particularly to minority women because they were heavily concentrated in these types of employment (U.S. Congress, 1987).

There has never been accurate documentation of the extent of gender differences in surveillance, but by the middle 1990s, estimates of the proportion of surveilled employees that were women ranged from 75% to 85% (Botan, 1996). Ironically, this gender imbalance in workplace surveillance may be evening out today because advances in surveillance technology are making surveillance of traditionally male dominated fields, such as long-distance truck driving, cheap, easy, and frequently unobtrusive .

Indeed, electronic surveillance has evolved into far too many forms for any one book, let alone a single chapter, to list and discuss. But there are some general forms of workplace surveillance that have remained important over many years , and these are the focus of the next section.

Forms of Electronic Surveillance

Assessing forms and frequency of surveillance for an international readership , such as might be expected for this book, presents a challenge because the workplace role of electronic surveillance results from a complex interplay of history, culture, law/public policy, and economic development, among other things. These make meaningful comparisons even between nations with a similar cultural heritage (e.g., Britain, Australia, Canada, and the U.S.) all but impossible , although Flaherty s 1989 book did provide many useful comparisons. In addition, although it is generally accepted that workplace surveillance is not as common in less developed economies as in more developed ones, there is little data to support that conclusion and, as between the developed countries , what there is does not lend itself to easy comparisons.

So finding data from which to draw meaningful generalizations about workplace surveillance is challenging. Our answer to these challenges, although open to justifiable criticism of being American-centric, is to use the series of workplace surveillance surveys conducted by the AMA between the middle 1990s and the early 2000s. These provide the most exhaustive available look at workplace surveillance and have the advantage of being longitudinal, thus allowing year-to-year comparisons and some trend analysis. In addition, these surveys studied the practices of many of the largest corporations in the world, whether headquartered in the U.S. or not, so they may provide at least some insight into international policies and practices.

Of those firms that acknowledged surveilling employees in the last AMA study (2001), almost half said they monitored employee phone calls, either by recording information about calls made (43.3%) or by actually listening to the calls themselves (11.9%); 46% stored and reviewed electronic mail and 7.8% voice mail messages of employees. A large percent monitored employees computers, either by recording computer use (timed logged on, number of key strokes, time between entries, etc. ” 18.9%), by storing and reviewing employees computer files (36.1%), or by monitoring Internet connections (62.8%); over 15% admitted to videotaping employee job performance and 37.7% to videotaping for security purposes [note that the latest advances in digitizing video surveillance may soon lead to a huge increase in this number]. Most of these numbers , when compared with similar data collected by the AMA between 1997 and 2001, reflect a growing trend.

Evidence suggests that these AMA data are still generally accurate. For example, in 2004 Haralson and Ahrens reported the results of a survey of 520 chief security officers conducted by CSO Magazine . This survey found that Internet monitoring had risen to 74%, while both storing and reviewing of e- mails (43%) and storing and reviewing computer files (31%) had remained relatively steady. Only videotaping of employee was significantly lower in the CSO study, at 18% compared to the 37.7% reported in the AMA study. This last figure may be misleading; however, because the AMA studies used a broad operationalization of videotaping that included very public areas such as entrances and exits, many of which information security officers would have little reason for monitoring. Indeed, it is to this question of reasons for electronic surveillance that this chapter now turns.

Reasons for Using Electronic Surveillance

There are, of course, many reasons for instituting surveillance. According to the most recent survey by the AMA (2001), the top reported reasons for using surveillance were legal compliance and liability, performance review, productivity measures, and security concerns. Other commonly cited justifications included prevention of technology misuse, protection of business information, security, and safety (Daugherty, 1999; Howard, 1998; Lee & Kleiner, 2003; Richard, 1999; Swanson, 2002; Zimmerman, 2002).

Another possible reason for surveilling may be the simple fact that the ability to surveil exists. This is not as flip a statement as it may sound. Really extensive surveillance is possible today because new technology makes it easy to use and relatively inexpensive to install (Hardin, 1999; Hartman, 1998; Howard, 1998; Palmer, 1998). So, this argument goes, those with the desire to surveil, perhaps because of being schooled in the management philosophies of Taylorism, MBO or TQM, can indulge a pre-existing desire for surveillance data more cheaply and easily today than at any time in the past.

Of course, the growth of new surveillance technology and practices has increased the potential for negative effects from surveillance because any negative effects would spread at the same rate as the practice itself. So it is important that decision makers clearly understand any negative effects. The next section reviews literature that documents some of the negative effects that electronic surveillance might have on employees.

Effects of Electronic Surveillance

The observed effects of workplace surveillance have made it an issue of concern in the popular press for many years (Aiello, 1993). Media reports have tended to sensationalize surveillance with article titles such as Big Brother At Work, Bosses Doing More Than Looking Over Workers Shoulders, and The Boss Never Blinks . Many of these articles take an inflammatory approach to the subject, portraying a workplace environment that falls just short of Orwell s 1984 . Numerous general interest magazine articles, within a range that varies from business to women s magazines, give voice to concerns over electronic surveillance (Frankel, 1996; Howard, 1998; Lewis, 1999; McNatt, 1999; Palmer, 1998; Prince, 1996a, 1996b; Richard, 1999; Smith & Williams-Harold, 1999). Such articles suggest an overall dissatisfaction with the lack of privacy rights in the workplace, and consistent language choices reflect a negative attitude towards electronic surveillance. Associated with the topic are words and expressions such as: spying, snooping, electronic spying , sneaking, espionage, prying , and Big Brother.

The management literature notes a number of cases of companies being sued for invading employee privacy through the use of electronic surveillance equipment (Alderman & Kennedy, 1996; Balitis, 1998; Smith & Faley, 2001). These lawsuits have increased awareness of the legal risks associated with using electronic devices to monitor employees. But possible detrimental effects of electronic surveillance are not restricted to legal risks and concern has been shown for the possibility that employee relations and employee morale may be negatively affected (Balitis, 1998; Fitting, 1995). In turn , poor employee relations and low morale could have a negative influence on the corporate bottom line, which might ultimately defeat one of the primary goals of electronic surveillance ” productivity increases .

Moreover, the scholarly literature reports studies that show an adverse effect of electronic surveillance on variables closely related to productivity, such as job satisfaction, turnover , and absenteeism (Kidwell & Bennett, 1994; Mishra & Crampton, 1998), workplace environment (Oz, Glass & Behling, 1999), and even job performance and productivity (Griffith, 1993; Nebeker & Tatum, 1993). Botan (1996), in a study that compared employees who considered themselves to be heavily surveilled to their less surveilled counterparts, also found significant negative or panoptic effects, including loss of privacy, increased uncertainty, and reduced communication. Even proponents of electronic surveillance advise management to consider negative stress- related and health effects caused by monitoring (Posch, 1993). Increasing concern with ethical considerations of privacy, fairness, and respect for employees is also manifested in professional literature (Brown, 2000; Hartman, 1998; Miller & Weckert, 2000; Mishra & Crampton, 1998; Parenti, 2001; Zimmerman, 2002).

A related concern that is important for this chapter is what the practice of electronic surveillance may communicate to employees about how they are seen by management, and about what is expected of them. There is a sense that electronic surveillance reduces trust between employees and management (Botan & Vorvoreanu, 2000; Connolly, 2001; Swanson, 2002) and sends the message to employees that work quantity is more valued than quality (Grant et al., 1988; Stanton & Julian, 2002).

Diminishing personal privacy is probably the most ethically important of the panoptic effects resulting from surveillance because it infringes upon the human right to a private identity and the decision-making autonomy based on it. It is not surprising that privacy loss has already been studied (Botan, 1996). A list of all the other panoptic effects that have been studied would be short, however, in spite of the fact that in some cases panoptic effects might cancel out the intended benefits of surveillance. In fact, in extreme cases, panoptic effects might be so severe that the net effect of workplace surveillance could be negative rather than positive. So the study reported here focused on both qualitative and quantitative measures of panoptic effects that had been previously reported, as well as on new ones. To provide structure to the investigation and discussion of results, we set out to provide at least a partial answer to the question, what do surveilled employees think about the experience?