This research report provides a detailed analysis of employee monitoring. The purpose of the report is to evaluate the process of employee monitoring that are used by the organizations today. In a general sense, employee monitoring is a process through which workplace surveillance is established to collect information about the activities and the locations of the organizational members. Organizations or the business could monitor employees to enhance productivity as well as protect corporate resources. Employee monitoring enables a business to keep record of employee activities as well as monitor worker engagement with the workplace related tasks (Chang, Liu and Lin 2015). The organizations with the help of employee monitoring process can measure the productivity, keep track of the attendance and ensure security.
The business owners or the organizations could use technology to delivery insight into employee behaviour on the basis of the trail of digital footprint generated each day in the workplace. Such technology could remain together to deliver the behaviour pattern that organizations may use to asses employee performance (Barber and Santuzzi 2015). There are many processes of employee monitoring which have further been discussed in the report. It is further observed that organizations could create complex ethical problems when they monitor employee and now the dilemma is whether business be able to monitor their workplace and if so, to what extent they should be restricted to? Likewise, there are other facts discussed in the report. This report tells how employers applies employee monitoring process, the barriers that employers face during the monitoring process and it provides suitable suggestions to avoid challenges and unethical activities when applying monitoring process.
Issues of employee monitoring- what is appropriate?
There are several dilemmas about employee monitoring and the process or employee monitoring. The research analysts mostly focus on the questions that what type of monitoring are usually acceptable? Alge and Hansen (2014) mentioned about a “U.S. Office Technology’ Assessment which defines the computerized performance monitoring as the computerized collection storage, reporting of information about employee productivity. It has been identified that the process of monitoring organisation’s workers is controversial practice which is undeniable. When digging into the fact of employee monitoring, it is found that there is a grey area and the newly developed laws in the recent time mandate that monitoring is legal, still the questions of effectiveness as well as the ethics increase. In this context, Moussa (2015) comment that business should monitor employees to protect both the organizations and the employees; however, the firms should give diligent attention to the ethical treatment of the worker. On the other side, Clearinghouse (2016) defined employee monitoring and knowledge management by printing out that organisations believe that by focussing exclusively on people, technology and the techniques, they could manage knowledge.
Nonetheless, such strategy may not allow an organization to gain a set of competitive advantage, so the business should create an environment which promote accountability and transparency to run the overall operation effectively (Jeske and Santuzzi 2015). At the initial stage of 21st century, the whole universe and particularly, the nation Australia has transformed from an industrial age to an information Age. Due to the arrival of internet Age, the businesses tend to face challenge from the employee abuse that takes place in the new communication model. In order to restrict the extent of risks, Holland, Cooper and Hecker (2015) mentioned that businesses today using advanced monitoring technology, which allow them “secretly to view, record and report literarily that everything employee do in the workplace or in their computers. In today’s technology based work environment, a growing number of employees tend to use computers to conduct their tasks and almost 50% 75% of the employees having access to a computer. In addition, almost 85% of employee internet access. So, as such platform is created a diverse sense of work ethics, knowledge, the business owners feel the necessity to monitor their activities of the workforce they read (West and Bowman 2016). An article conducted by Shahri et al. (2014), mentioned about the fact that one significant issue with the workplace monitoring tis that in spite of employee monitoring system, several workers still conduct some activities that are subject to disciplinary actions.
The dilemma: Employee monitoring
Employers could create complicated issues when they supervise or monitor employees. If the situation remains so, the major questions is, to what extent, the employers should be restricted. It is an undiscussed fact whether the employees have the right to learn that their owners are monitoring them. Hence, each of these questions could create a multifaceted response from business side as well as the opinion of the employees. As put forward by Chang, Liu and Lin (2015), excessive use of internet created the scope to peer into literally everything employees do online. As per the opinions of this author, the employers created employee monitoring as there is a substantial requirement for companies to supervise their workforce. If the employers do nothing to preen these counter-productive activities, then the chances of staying in the business is less. In this context, Moussa (2015) commented that workplace monitoring could be advantageous for a company to gain productivity as well as efficiency from its workforce. Hence, Guragai et al. (2015) reported that enormity of the loss of the productivity could be approximately around one million dollars on an annual basis for an organization with 500 employees.
By considering this fact, if an employee spends at least two hours per day on the internet and the basins might have 500 million unsupervised employees, the overall loss could be around $4 million (Hess 2015). It is also identified that while computers are often necessary for work tools, providing employees with open, unmonitored as well as computer access could cause productivity as well as efficiency to hamper. There should be a proper balance between the protection of organization’s information assets and the point where workers could feel estranged. Therefore, Tomlinson (2016) mentioned that education and communication are the appropriate tools to attain such balance. By educating employees about what is monitoring and what the company will monitor ad transfer the message that the monitoring process is conducted due to lack of trust, however, it is being used to protect the information of the organisations. The major misbalance or the disconnection between the company and the employee interpretation is, the poor or inappropriate communication or lack of training. In this context, Feng et al. (2016) commented that that one significant way for business to avoid liability for supervising or monitoring workers’ online activities, is to apply all important steps to omit any reasonable expectation of privacy that employees may have about the use of email and other mode of communication.
Legal facts of employee monitoring
As discussed earlier Dau-Schmidt, Finkin and Covington (2016) new technologies could often create the requirement for newt regulations. For example, Portal System in Australia demonstrate how the laws are changed to resolve new technological use. The government of many nations have developed anti-tempering law with respect to increase resilience on the email system. According to such regulations constitutional protection to mail, which requires the official from the governments to get a court order to access it. On the other side, Chang, Liu and Lin (2015) mentioned about Marshall’s postal example that demonstrate that how regulations often lag behind technological development. In addition to this, it is worth mentioning that email system is a like a new version of postal mail. However, it is often discussed that while laws currently protect some from opening or tempering with the postal mail, the similar type of regulations do not presently protect the email. In this context, Moussa, (2015) commented that different of business and employees have different applicable laws, which further complicate the legal grounds of both private and public sector. The regulations that have been developed in the recent time state that applying employee monitoring system is never illegal. Moreover, some organisations do not use the information gain from monitoring employees as the potential evidence in several legal cases.
Ethical issues
As put forward by Pierce, Snow and McAfee (2015), monitoring action of employees could create a significant debate regarding whether a worker should have the right to the privacy. Nonetheless, employee monitoring could also involve some ethical facts. Bhave (2014) mentioned about the facts that some of the ethical issues could involve employees downloading or watching pornography and putting personal web page on organizations owned business or showing offensive content or images on office’s computers. Moussa (2015) performed a research and found that in small private organizations, employees are often found to be playing games on their personal system, sending personal emails and using chat options for personal conversations and many more unethical activities. Two major problems are day trading and shopping online. Nonetheless, it is certain that ethical issues that an organization looks at could differ from what an employee consider ethical. So, again it goes back to the point on what is allowed or permissible and what is unacceptable.
The author has continued by stating the fact that business might act unethically when mentioning keystrokes, looking at private emails or providing inadequate equipment which further leads to vision, neck, and hand and arm damage. In this context, Hess (2015) commented that keystroke monitoring remains invasive as each time employee takes rest and probably stretch for health or having a short chat for sanity’s sake, the person could be off task. So such strict monitoring could create ruling or workplace decisions that could discipline the worker for simply taking a genuine break. Hence, monitoring program may not know when a worker has an upset stomach and he/she need to be away from the desk. It is just visible that the employee is not currently working.
Suggestions for developing suitable monitoring process
It is identified that from employer’s perspective there are some particular benefits to monitoring employees. The business must have a thoughtful strategy to identify the scope of what they could monitor and how they could monitor; mostly importantly who will perform the task and how it will be funded. Chang, Liu and Lin (2015) mentioned that most of the employees could prefer that there could be no monitoring; however, the employees should have a system in place to make sure productivity and restrict the challenges of legal liability. It is identified that knowledge management system in place can guide an organization to monitor users and provide the suitable benefits of enhanced performance as well as increase organizational awareness.
In this context, Jeske and Santuzzi (2015)commented that “Acceptable Use Policy” are one of the most general organizational policies that state how workers can use organizational system and what they can demand as the privacy. However, there is a one significant fact that should be talent into account is crating task or updating “Acceptable Use Policy and the issues related to privacy is not supposed to be by done by the IT department or it is not the responsibility of the IT department. Thus, to avoid such issue, the policy update and companies should be given to the cross functional team effort that involve representatives from human resources. In addition, the legal and IT department should council the items, content or the monitoring process and they will decide who will monitor the activity and how will it be monitored. In addition to this, if an organization already develops the policy in place, the organization should adopt the policy at least on an annual basis to determine if the policy is in step with current procedures. Furthermore, with the corporate policies, an email and internet usage should be specific, easy to figure out as well as should be consistent with other business policies.
Conclusion
This research report is performed on employee monitoring because employee monitoring process has now become a significant debateable topic for research. This happens because different organizations have different set of policies and procedures. The purpose of the report was to evaluate how employee monitoring process is applied to business and how the process create impact on the employees and the employers. The findings of the research implies that employee monitoring process followed by the firms are often controversial and lead to unethical state because the employee and employers’ perspective often differ from each other and on the other hand, there are some particular legal principles that often stand as the barrier to the process. However, it is necessary for the organizations to take legal and technical advice when designing the employee monitoring process. This assignment work helps to learn that there should be a proper balance between employee perspectives regarding ethics and employer’s perspective. It is learnt that employee monitoring is important to protect the business from unnecessary hazards such as use of unacceptable content during working the office. However, the policies should be developed following the legal principles; this employee perspective also need to be considered in employee monitoring process.
References
Alge, B.J. and Hansen, S.D., 2014. Workplace monitoring and surveillance research since 1984: A review and agenda (pp. 209-237). Routledge, New York.
Barber, L.K. and Santuzzi, A.M., 2015. Please respond ASAP: Workplace telepressure and employee recovery. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 20(2), p.172.
Bhave, D.P., 2014. The invisible eye? Electronic performance monitoring and employee job performance. Personnel psychology, 67(3), pp.605-635.
Chang, S.E., Liu, A.Y. and Lin, S., 2015. Exploring privacy and trust for employee monitoring. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 115(1), pp.88-106.
Chang, S.E., Liu, A.Y. and Lin, S., 2015. Exploring privacy and trust for employee monitoring. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 115(1), pp.88-106.
Chang, S.E., Liu, A.Y. and Lin, S., 2015. Exploring privacy and trust for employee monitoring. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 115(1), pp.88-106.
Clearinghouse, P.R., 2016. Workplace privacy and employee monitoring. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
Dau-Schmidt, K.G., Finkin, M. and Covington, R., 2016. Legal protection for the individual employee. West Academic.
Feng, J., Zhang, Y., Liu, X., Zhang, L. and Han, X., 2016. Just the right amount of ethics inspires creativity: A cross-level investigation of ethical leadership, intrinsic motivation, and employee creativity. Journal of Business Ethics, pp.1-14.
Guragai, B., Hunt, N.C., Neri, M.P. and Taylor, E.Z., 2015. Accounting information systems and ethics research: Review, synthesis, and the future. Journal of Information Systems, 31(2), pp.65-81.
Hess, D., 2015. Ethical Infrastructure and Evidence-Based Corporate Compliance and Ethics Programs: Policy Implications from the Empirical Evidence. NYUJL & Bus., 12, p.317.
Holland, P.J., Cooper, B. and Hecker, R., 2015. Electronic monitoring and surveillance in the workplace: The effects on trust in management, and the moderating role of occupational type. Personnel Review, 44(1), pp.161-175.
Jeske, D. and Santuzzi, A.M., 2015. Monitoring what and how: psychological implications of electronic performance monitoring. New Technology, Work and Employment, 30(1), pp.62-78.
Moussa, M., 2015. Monitoring employee behavior through the use of technology and issues of employee privacy in America. Sage Open, 5(2), p.2158244015580168.
Moussa, M., 2015. Monitoring employee behavior through the use of technology and issues of employee privacy in America. Sage Open, 5(2), p.2158244015580168.
Moussa, M., 2015. Monitoring employee behavior through the use of technology and issues of employee privacy in America. Sage Open, 5(2), p.2158244015580168.
Pierce, L., Snow, D.C. and McAfee, A., 2015. Cleaning house: The impact of information technology monitoring on employee theft and productivity. Management Science, 61(10), pp.2299-2319.
Shahri, A., Hosseini, M., Phalp, K., Taylor, J. and Ali, R., 2014, November. Towards a code of ethics for gamification at enterprise. In IFIP Working Conference on The Practice of Enterprise Modeling (pp. 235-245). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Tomlinson, E.C., 2016. The role of trust in employee theft. In Crime and Corruption in Organizations (pp. 141-162). Routledge.
West, J.P. and Bowman, J.S., 2016. Electronic surveillance at work: An ethical analysis. Administration & Society, 48(5), pp.628-651
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