monitoring of employee

Analyze the following Case in this week’s Module, Cases are short and intended to highlight a few key concepts from our Module.
This is a graded assignment.
Your answer must be responsive to the question asked to receive full points, see Rubric.
Your answer must be 200 words or more.
No plagiarism
Ironically, at a time that American managers are moving more towards more positive, employee-empowering approaches to motivation, technology has allowed for ever-closer monitoring of employee activities. In a recent article titled “Snooping Bosses,” Time magazine pulled startling data from some recent studies: nine out of ten employers observe your electronic behavior; 76% of employers watch you surf the Web; 36% track content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard; and 38% hire staff to sift through your email. The article also cites more extreme examples. A new product called HyGenius can detect restaurant employee handwashing and soap usage. A security firm in California installed specialized GPS systems in company cell phones to alert the boss if workers strayed from their territories or drove too fast. And at an Ohio firm called Citywatcher, some workers volunteered to have ID chips embedded in their arms.
While these examples are somewhat extreme, technology consulting firm Gartner claims that 60% of companies will have implemented formal programs for monitoring external social media by 2015 (e.g. your personal Facebook and Twitter accounts). According to a senior VP of Gartner, “employers will continue to pursue greater visibility of social media conversations held by employees, customers and the general public when the topics are of interest to the corporation… Security organizations are beginning to see value in capturing and analyzing social media content, not just for internal security surveillance, but also to detect shifting threats that might affect the organization. These might include physical threats to facilities revealed through postings, or planned attacks by hacktivists.”
Clearly, there are powerful arguments both for and against employer monitoring of workers. Here are some of the issues to spark your thinking:
In favor of monitoring:
Increased surveillance of employees can mitigate risks for businesses.
Monitoring workers can increase productivity and decrease waste.
Against monitoring:
Employers could use even “innocent” information in an illegal/discriminatory way (e.g. membership in certain groups could lead to age or nationality discrimination)
Employers could use offhand comments unfairly (e.g. “I had a terrible day” as evidence of a bad attitude)
Workers who know they are being watched probably behave quite differently.
Personal data in the wrong hands (untrustworthy managers, or lost or stolen) could become a personal threat to employees.
The feeling of violation from being watched could hurt worker-management trust, which could undermine morale and motivation
Do you believe managers are justified in monitoring employees? Should managers always alert workers about monitoring? At what point (if any) does management monitoring become unethical? Do you have a different perspective as a manager versus an employee?

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