Is it right to spy on the employees?
That is the question which will be discussed in this blog entry. The following discussion is based on the article Snooping Bosses (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1531312,00.html).
First I want to talk about the different reasons to have surveillance on the employees. The reasons are different for different types of companies. As I see it there are three main reasons for surveillance:
- · Large companies with a lot of people working in an office environment have the need to minimize the time the employees’ spend on non-work related things. The company can save much money if the employees focus on their work. It’s also easy for the company to discover members of teams which do less than the others.
- · In businesses where research and development is important, e.g. drug or defence industry, it’s essential to keep the inventions and discoveries secret until they are patented. A pharmaceutical company spend millions of euro to find new molecules which can be used in drugs and if the information would leak to rivals they could lose a lot of money.
- · People working for examples as doctors, police officers or teachers have a big ethical responsibility. A police officer can’t use his authority for personal gains and a doctor who makes bad decision must be stopped. The surveillance is (sort of) for the greater good.
I think all the reasons are justified to a certain degree. A company can’t pay someone who doesn’t do their work. It’s also unfair to the other employees of someone doesn’t pull one’s weight. The second reason is very important for the companies which need to use it. Nowadays the rivalry is very hard in certain types of businesses and much can depend on a new type of product. The third reason can be hard to judge because we also have to trust the work they are doing and not question all of their decisions. Sometimes a police officer has to make hard decisions which someone else who is not there has a hard time to understand. I think it’s not good with too much surveillance if it’s done because of the third reason.
One danger with increased surveillance is that some people don’t want to work at a company that have them under too much surveillance. The employees and their knowledge and ideas are very important for companies like Google. Google have made a great effort to make the company an attractive place to work (with free lunches and day care centres etc.) and thereby many of the best programmers etc. choose to work for them. The point is that if people don’t feel comfortable with the company’s surveillance policy it’ll have a hard time to attract the most skilled persons.
The article Snooping Bosses is from the U.S and the situation are not the same in Sweden. According to a report from the Swedish Data Inspection Board (a summary can be found at http://www.datainspektionen.se/Documents/rapport-monworklife-summary.pdf) called Monitoring in Working Life (2005:3) the surveillance in Sweden was much lower around this time. For example the camera surveillance of employees in workplaces where the public doesn’t have access was “rather unusual”. The conclusion of the report is that many employers have the technical possibilities to carry out surveillance of the email and internet use but they don’t use this possibility.
In my opinion surveillance at the working place is okay to a certain degree. After all you get your salary because you are supposed to work, not looking at Facebook.
