January 19, 2008

Think your boss is nosy? Check this out… 

Were you one of those employees who spent the early years of workplace internet access surfing online shopping sites? Did you answer personal ads and update your wardrobe on your employer’s dime? Well, you’ve brought down the posse on everyone else.  

 

A few years ago there was a series of studies indicating that employers lose billions of dollars in productivity each year because of inappropriate use of the internet and email. The marketplace quickly responded. Employee monitoring software is now one of the fasted growing areas of the software sector. Various packages allow employers to read employee emails, log keystrokes, and restrict access to removable media like CDs and USB drives.  (See video below.)

 

So now when you sit behind the walls of your cubicle, your boss, your company’s human resources department, and corporate IT security services are all sitting there with you. (How’s that for a warm and fuzzy feeling?) 

And it gets better. If Microsoft has its way, employers will also be able to monitor your physiological state via your laptop and other electronic gadgetry: 

Microsoft is developing software that may help employers to monitor the productivity, competence and physical well-being of employees while sitting at a distance…. 

The software will even reveal when an employee is stressed or frustrated by reading his/her heartbeat and facial expressions.

A patent application filed by the company reveals that the whole process will be based on a computer system that links workers to their computers through wireless sensors that measures their metabolism.  

The system will be able to measure workers' heart rate, body temperature, brain signals, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.

--(Fox News) 

As you might expect, this is drawing fire from civil liberties groups and privacy advocates. My guess is that this Microsoft initiative will never get off the ground. If any employer were to actually deploy this system and start using the data it provides to make personnel decisions, the lawyers would have a field day.  

P.S. 

I should mention in closing that I am not in favor of winking at on-the-job web surfing. If an employer is forking out a salary, health care benefits, and other goodies, then the company has a right to expect that the employee will give a fair day’s worth of effort in return.  

But employers should focus on pay-for-performance countermeasures rather than monitoring. Pay for performance brings out the best in an employee. Big Brotherish monitoring turns even the most motivated worker into a peevish ten-year-old.