The case of employee monitoring has lately been getting quite a bit of heat, especially in light of a recent news report where a woman refused to be monitored by her employer and was subsequently fired for it. The issue of workplace privacy itself is not new, but as more innovations in employee surveillance methods occur, employers are once again reevaluating what it at stake. But there is no denying it; employee monitoring is going mobile.
On the one hand, there is the issue of drawing the line between what to monitor and what not to monitor. Recording everything an employee does at work can be counterproductive and the employer may not even know what to do with that much raw data. On the other hand, leaving an employee be can have serious consequences. At the very basic end, monitoring ensures that all employees are complying with regulations and the code of conduct is being following. For another, it ensures that the business has hard evidence should an employee fail to abide by office rules. However, there are direr circumstances that make mobile monitoring seem a little more viable. Consider a single small business that can lose over $5 million from employee misappropriation. And that’s not all.
Threat from the inside can be more lethal for your business than threat from the outside. Unfaithful employees can be motivated by many things—better opportunities, higher pay, or securing a spot with the competitor. If your relationship with them should go sour, you might see your IT assets be stolen—or worst case scenario, you’ll find all our trade secrets given up through espionage.
Amidst all the security threats, businesses wonder at what point employee monitoring stops being surveillance and starts becoming an invasion of privacy. Strictly speaking, employers can track what websites their employees visit at the office, who and what they email and what they do on the company provided mobile devices. And now that monitoring has gone mobile, XNSPY has targeted these factors—that an employer can monitor by right—and brought it to Android. A mobile application is a simpler, less intrusive way to ensure security, and allows for data mining so employers know what problem areas to look for.
Employee monitoring, when done right, definitely has its benefits. Take DANCEL Multimedia, which found out that their employees were making side deals with the clients instead of bringing business to the company and decided to take on monitoring more effectively.
The only problem with applications like these is that employers may find out more about private lives than employee would have otherwise allowed. They may find out more about their religious and political views, sexual orientations or other private details that may cause discriminatory behavior. That’s where XNSPY’s alerts or data mining feature for Android will come in handy. It allows employers and managers to mark beforehand what sorts of things they wish to keep an eye on. This includes buzzwords in emails, text messages and websites. When the employee does something suspicious, a red flag is raised and the employer is the first to know.
Employee monitoring is essential to corporate mobility, that much is for sure. However, the premise for such surveillance needs to be restricted to activity within the office and on company provided devices.
