It’s a real story of employee computer monitoring. “I just visited the Facebook website, 10 minutes later I got a phone call from my boss, who was in another city, asking me why I am on that website rather than working. It’ s like that my boss is behind me and watching. Too paranoiac! ”
My friend Katie is pouring out her experience this morning. Katie works in the sales department of a small company. She says, every day, the first thing after she starts the computer is updating her My-Space or chatting with friends but not beginning to work. Not only her but also everyone else in the office does like this. Some guys even frequently visit sexually explicit sites and game sites. That’ s a common thing in her company.
Depending on the developed technology, employees can indulge themselves in the cyberspace to against the tedious work by means of instant messengers, personal email accounts and social networking sites. Meanwhile, the time-wasting Internet uses to prevent them from getting their work done. On a business level, this represents productivity lost and, ultimately, money lost. Beyond worrying about this, employers take means to prevent cyberspace loafing.
Nowadays, the new technologies allow employers to use spy software to check whether employees are wasting time browsing recreational websites or sending personal emails. Then how they do it? Actually, that’ s what Katie wonders.
Most employers who monitor their staff would apply software directly into the company computers thus employee monitoring software has become more widespread in the workplaces, varying from small companies to big IT leading enterprises. There is no shortage of such kind of software available for purchase. Employee monitoring software allows company administrators to monitor and supervise all their employee computers from a central location. Programs like IMonitor can record detailed activities of users, including emails, instant messages, keystrokes, print jobs, files transferred, websites visited, applications used and much more. Some employee monitoring software with remote spy features gives company administrators the authority to remotely monitor office computers from any place at any time. This must be what Katie’ s boss utilizes.
The answer is positive. According to a survey, 70 percent of the companies which apply employee spy app have enhanced staff efficiency and production, what’ s more, confidential data transfer cases decrease sharply. Surveillance is now a routine business practice among employers.
However, this always eventually leads to conflict as employees may feel that monitoring is an unacceptable invasion of privacy but employers want to be sure that employees are keeping loyalty and not abusing company resource.
The ultimate way to solve this problem is making a concession between both parties. Employers need to balance the monitoring from invasion. As to employees, sometimes they do have to handle some personal matters while using employee computer monitoring software, but at least they should have the sense to quit spending a long time on Facebook during working hours.