I read an article Snooping Bosses by Kristina Dell and Lisa Takeuchi Cullen how the major companies nowadays keep track on their employees. The whole situation is quite tricky, on one hand you want to preserve employees integrity, but on the other hand you also understand the corporations measures, who don’t want to waste any money on non-working or cheating unreliable employees.
Basically I think that It´s OK if the employer uses SurfControl, MessageGate, Workshare or Palisade to keep an all seeing eye over the e-mail conversations. Or at least the e-mails in a conversation that contains certain keywords that draws the attention from the C.E.O.
Because an employee is given a salary to perform a task, and if the employee is using this time (company’s money) to backstabbing the C.E.O, creating a non-friendly working place or for that matter building up his personal collection of porn then he/she doesn’t not only use the time to other things then what he/she is hired to do, the employee also violates the work contract and behavior policy.
But how bad is it really? If the employee uses the web, the company phone or etc. to relax or to stress down and this act makes the work better? Where should the line be drawn ?
Here´s where I get another crease in my brain and things gets double. I think that the relation between the employee and the chief or director have to be a reliable and straight-answered relation. We are now back to the "paid to perform" demand, and I have hard to see how a director would be disappointed if a employee gets the work done and perform his working tasks as expected regardless if the employee is using some of the time to do "other than work".
To take one example of this free type responsibility from the director I can mention Google, Google crushes al resistance in the competition of the most desired company for academics. And at Google they uses the "freedom during responsibility leadership" and I think this type of atmosphere is very creative and as we all now, Google owns the world so there´s no question if this "freedom during responsibility leadership" is effective and reliable leadership type for major and companies. But what about all the employees in a company that doesn’t uses computer or other digital-aid-systems, cant they cheat and wasting paid work-time to pick their nose or slander with co-workers? Who will survey them in mistrust?
My experience from a major Swedish industrial company with over 120 000 employees is that there´s is almost 4 employees in the construction without a computer then computer aided white-collar workers. And my experience also tells me that the industrial workers with little responsibility and easy tasks are more likely to waste their work-time.
But these under the radar flying employees with no other survey options than the naked eye are harder to survey in mistrust. And frankly I don’t have any solutions, I will have wrinkle my brain a little more and return with a cleaver answer.
With this said I apparently don´t it´s OK to supervise employees after working time. If a director believes an employee is cheating with sick-days or likewise he/she should talk with this employee. And if there´s still a reliability problem towards this employee the chief have to decide if he´s trusting or not to this person. The chief/directors have a roll in the company and according to me that roll isn´t to survey his employees. Of course exceptions and rare situations of mistrust can occur, and in this situations measures needs to be taken such as questioning etc. and in extreme situations surveillance. But surveillance after work time is only justified during extreme mistrust situations.
Bottom-line, if you have the right employees give them freedom under responsibility and if you don’t have the right employees, get new ones.
