Employee Monitoring! i think its Evil

There has been lot of controversy around monitoring the computer system of employees inside an organizational network. Vendors all around the globe have come up with some of the amazing employee pc monitoring systems, whether its a keylogger, a website monitor, a chat monitor, even application monitoring (which tells you what programs were used by the person), screenshot monitoring, video monitoring of the computer terminal, file copy\ modified\deleted , usb drives and other kinds of devices used etc etc.

Now, there are good points and some bad points about monitoring your employees.

The good points are:-

1. You are assured that your employees will not make a mistake of leaking out your confidential data

2. You are assured that any outsider\disgruntled insider who is temporarily using one of your computers will not be able to steal your critical data

3. You know well who is trying to access what kind of data

4. You can even find out if people are actually working or watching youtube videos during their work hours

The bad points are:-

1. You are breaking privacy of your own people

2. Employee monitoring might create serious de motivation and unhappiness among your employees

3. There could be few legal complications in some of the ways of employee monitoring

4. If access to the data generated from the monitoring gets in to wrong hands, you can imagine well what could happen next

There could be lot of other good and bad points about employee monitoring which i might have missed.

Now, lets try to find out what do you have when you start monitoring all the personal computers in your organization:-

1. You have record of every keystroke, which will have emails, passwords, credit card number, may be social security numbers, bank account details, health information etc etc

2. You will have access to thousands of screenshots and videos of the personal compters used in your organziation tracking every activity on that machine

3. You will have access to the online behavior of each and every person in your organization

It looks like you feel like going for an online monitoring systems and in fact lot of companies are doing that for a very long time. But, what about the bad points?

Its simple,why should a person buy a Christmas gift during working with his credit card. Why john should write an email to his girlfriend at the time when he is supposed to finish the proposal his boss told him to. Why bill should be trying to send a job application to another company because he wants a better job. It should have been all right if these people would have done these things from their own personal computer.

So, you see, you can justify that you should monitor your people. But, whats the proof? and what about legal complications?

There is something call job contract which is a list of points you want to have in agreement with the person you are working with and both of you sign on that only if both of you agree with those points. So, i hope you understand how can you handle those legal complications and thats a really good passport to allow you for monitoring might not be the way you want, but to some extent.

Regarding the demotivation and unhappiness crap, i dont have a clue how to get this sorted out. But, i hope all those smart CEOs and Management Gurus should be able to handle it.