Big brother is watching you at the workplace
Employee monitoring is often in conflict with employees’ privacy. Monitoring in the workplace may put employers and employees at odds with each other because both sides are trying to protect their own personal interests. Employees want to maintain privacy while employers want to ensure that company resources aren’t misused.
Though monitoring has been long done by prying eyes of a human boss, the advent of the Internet at the workplace in the 1990’s introduced tools like website blocker and software to snoop into employees emails. Since then, such electronic surveillance has been a widespread and a growing phenomenon.
New York times reports that advanced technological tools make it possible to measure and monitor employees as never before, with the promise of fundamentally changing how we work. The digital sentinels at the workplace track every employee and every transaction looking for patterns that might suggest employee theft.
Such close surveillance software have been welcomed by many companies from pharmaceutical, IT and healthcare industries monitoring thousands of employees. However, much enthusiasm is exhibited by the financial industry where instances abound of single employees bringing down the whole company.
Bloomberg reports that JPMorgan Chase on the backdrop of more than $36 billion in legal bills since the financial crisis of 2008, is rolling out a programme to identify rogue employees before they go astray. The software will be monitoring and analysing using scores of information like whether workers skip compliance classes, violate personal trading rules or breach market-risk limits.
The employer of today has the ability to read employee’s e-mail, review files stored on a company computer, examine computer usage even for removable media, and track individual employee computer activities including social media transaction. Every action by an individual worker can be tracked and analysed by the software. This has certainly raised privacy debates. However, automated surveillance is here to stay for any industry where insurmountable amount of e-mails and electronic data flow back and forth overwhelming the ability of humans to monitor them.
Our perspective
A very fundamental shift in the role of values and ethics is underway. Ethics are no longer merely desirable or a matter of choice or an outcome of theological/spiritual beliefs. CCTVs have already become ubiquitous in public life with hordes of installations in streets, banks, supermarkets, schools, airports, offices and even restaurants to reduce crime and increase public safety. In the UK, it is estimated that there are already around 2 million CCTVs – one for every 32 residents.
Historically, surveillance was cumbersome and expensive. Today, we find ourselves in a world of constant surveillance, where everything is collected, saved, searched, correlated and analysed. Now, one’s private life could also always be under the lens as one goes around doing daily mundane tasks. Be it the use of the Internet, mobile, GPS or credit card, our every action like click on websites, conversations on phone, messages, emails, location will be scanned and assessed to detect deviation from the desired/usual behaviour. Though helpful in crime detection and prevention, it will be a dramatic fulfilment of Orwellian prophecy of constant surveillance as there will always be a ‘Big brother’ watching you.
Compliance to ethics will be a compulsion as our digital shadows will be under constant scrutiny and software will be able to pattern our lives and predict our next action. Good behaviour and ethics will have to be adhered to religiously.
Honesty, integrity, and always ethical choices are no more good values; they must be a part of our thinking and behaviour,
24 X 7.
Gazing through the crystal ball
- Get professional and ethical; children must grow in such an environment. Be their role models.
- Be careful about digital transactions as these are footprints forever; can never really be deleted and could be a very damaging source of embarrassment later in life.
- Being ethical and very professional is no more a matter of choice – it’s compulsory; the chances of exposure is extremely high.
