Employee Snooping Research Paper

“Attention: This Area is Under Constant CCTV Surveillance & You are Being Watched”

How many times you have come across this warning or have witnessed a CCTV hovering over your head? With CCTV cameras everywhere, how likely is it that your employer/client is keeping an eye on you? Basically, 99% of the time.

But the question is ‘What is the need for employee snooping’?

There are numerous reasons forcing employers to snoop their staff, including:

• To access and improve productivity

• To retain and reward their best performers

• To ensure quality of their customer service

• To safeguard their workforce – health & safety reasons

• To ensure that the company policies are not being broken

• To comply with legal and regulatory

According to American Management Association Survey, approximately 66% of American companies keep a close watch over their employee internet activity. Around 45% use keystrokes and at least 43% keep a track of employee emails.

Employee Retention via Workplace Surveillance – How is it done?

Office Surveillance helps employers understand employee behavior and ongoing workplace equations. It also helps them track individual work and monitor ongoing performance; thus enabling them to revise work policies to increase employee engagement and productivity. Monitoring internet usage, job board & social media activities and official data usage empower management to understand workforce requirements and hence, help them re-frame retention, sourcing and engagement policies.

Legalized in most part of the world, employers are allowed to snoop their employees via certain ethical methods; such as:

1. Fingerprint

It tracks their behavior, physical misconduct, abuse or any other physical function that cannot be performed in a workplace.

3. Office Computers

Companies are authorized to monitor any hardware issued by the firm to their employees. Monitoring office computers and laptops provide employers a great deal of information related to work hours, data usage and data privacy. Most of the time firms use a keylogger software to monitor work hours and data usage of their staff. These tools help them keep website records and password details used by an employee.

4. Office Phones

As stated above, companies are entitled to monitor official hardware data usage. Official phones could be recorded for security purposes. These data are then monitored to improve the quality of work (customer service). These recordings also help employers understand the appropriate or inappropriate usage of the hardware by the staff.

5. Personal Phones

Employers cannot monitor personal phones of their staff.

However, if you are spending your work hours conversing loudly about your weekend trips, you could be disciplined for not working. Employers cannot track your personal calls, but could certainly keep a close watch at the inappropriate use of office