• Text Size
• Print
• Email

  From:
  

  To:
  

  Hey! Check out this news page: https://www.thebackgroundinvestigator.com/Articles/Unblinking-Eyes-Track-Employees/1633/index.php.

  SendCancel

Top Stories

Unblinking Eyes Track Employees

July 01, 2014 posted by Steve Brownstein

A digital Big Brother is coming to work, for better or worse. Advanced technological tools are beginning to make it possible to measure and monitor employees as never before, with the promise of fundamentally changing how we work — along with raising concerns about privacy and the specter of unchecked surveillance in the workplace.

Through these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are more productive if they have more social interaction. So a bank’s call center introduced a shared 15-minute coffee break, and a pharmaceutical company replaced coffee makers used by a few marketing workers with a larger cafe area.

The result? Increased sales and less turnover. The software used to monitor employees at the Dallas restaurant where Jim Sullivan, center, works helped demonstrate his productivity, which helped lead to his promotion there. Yet the prospect of fine-grained, digital monitoring of workers’ behavior worries privacy advocates.

Companies, they say, have few legal obligations other than informing employees. “Whether this kind of monitoring is effective or not, it’s a concern,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.