Workplace surveillance has become increasingly popular over the past few years, and there are now numerous methods that can be used to monitor employees, these include:.
Hidden Cameras;.
Keyboard Monitoring (counting keystrokes, eg. data-entry);.
Undercover Workers (similar to spies);.
Telephone and Email Monitoring;.
Monitored Web Use; and.
Monitoring Staff Locations (electronic locators).
Over seventy five per cent of employees in the USA are being monitored in some form as they go about their day-to-day routines, many of which are unaware that the surveillance is even in place (Serwer, 2003). This highlights the magnitude of workplace surveillance, yet its application is expected to grow significantly more in the near future.
There are numerous reasons as to why workplace surveillance has become such common practice in the everyday workforce, mainly relating to employees being less productive, and in some cases behaving in an inappropriate or even illegal manner.
Instead of monitoring only those employees whose exhibit suspicious behaviour, many employers are instituting "continuous, systematic surveillance- in the workplace in order to identify any wrong doing by all employees (Schulman, Privacy Foundations, 2003). This involves continually monitoring your employee's every move using techniques such as computer monitoring, which involves examining an employee's use of a computer both during and after it is used. This can be achieved with the aid numerous technologies including: .
Packet Sniffers:.
A packet sniffer is a program that can see all of the information passing over the network it is connected to. As data streams back and forth on the network, the program looks at it, or "sniffs,"" each packet. The packet is the part of the message that has been broken up.
Log Files:.
Computers are full of log files that provide evidence of what you have been doing (eg. Internet History). Through these log files, a system administrator can determine what web sites you have accessed, who you are sending emails to and receiving emails from, and what applications are being used.
