Electronic Monitoring and Employee Productivity Assignment

Electronic Monitoring and Employee Productivity - Assignment Example Most employees are subjected to monitoring that includes office and cubicle searches, video surveillance, electronic mail monitoring and health and psychological screening (Schumacher, 2011, pp 138-144). The current trends in electronic monitoring especially in the 21st century have increased at an alarming rate. The latest monitoring trends include the use of video cameras, email monitoring and telephone recordings among others. The monitoring has moved to network forensic monitoring software that is currently in use to mine emails for keywords and security breaches (Schumacher, 2011, pp 138-144). Most managers say that without monitoring employee activities it is difficult to achieve productivity especially in this era of social networking. The rise of the internet compounded by the development of the smart phones have made it difficult for employees to stick to work and therefore contributing to decreased productivity. This may not be true considering some of the theories that hav e been propagated about employees and productivity (Schumacher, 2011, pp 138-144). McGregor’s theory X and Y help us understand the positive and the negative aspects of employing electronic monitoring at the workplace.... Tailor says that employees should do what managers tell them to do and the managers tell the employees what to do in order to be paid accordingly. This theory has been used to support electronic monitoring so as to achieve productivity and pay employees what they are entitled to depending on what they have done (Bolden, Gosling, A, & Dennison, 2003, pp 6-50). Therefore employee monitoring can be seen as both positive and negative in many aspects. Implementing the electronic surveillance will mean that employees are under tight control from the management and therefore they may end up being less productivity as McGregor puts it. On the other hand the productivity might increase because when they are monitored, the time they are not productive is subtracted from the total time. This means that by the end of the day their wages will be reduced. The reduction will make them leave the activities that make them less productive so as to increase their wages (Schumacher, 2011, pp 138-144). E mployee monitoring has been criticized by a number of people because it infringes on the rights of both the customer and the employee. It is not the best form of management as it increases stress, decreases job satisfaction, cultivates a culture of mistrust and negative work relationships and therefore it is not. To some level there are key ethical considerations that encourage employee electronic monitoring and these include security as concerns a company’s information such as trade secrets or restricted places, productivity as in employees have to be at the right place at the right time and doing the right things at the right time, reputation as employers do not want company information such as logos to be found at the wrong place that may cause them