When the business watches you (part 2)

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- Latin for "Who will guard the guards?"
from the satires of the Roman poet Juvenal

I realize the subject of employee monitoring is a major one, and I could easily devote a whole blog (or book) to it and its spiritual implications. With that in mind, I am going to make this my second and last post on the subject for now, knowing fully well we may return to it in the near future.

One possible source of anxiety in the consideration of employee monitoring is how it empowers management even further in a game that seems set to their advantage from the outset. While we are contitutionally entitled to privacy, an employer can take away our jobs, and with it, our livelihood, at least for the short-term. The state of New York, where I work, is an "at-will" state, meaning that an employer can decide to terminate an employee at any time, and for any reason, so long as the reason cannot be legally established as discriminatory or coercive. It is legally acceptable for an employer to terminate us because they don't like what we say.

Further, many employers require employees to sign agreements that permit monitoring of electronic communications. Is this because we actually welcome such scrutiny? Hardly. It is the proverbial offer that cannot be refused. Sign it, or find a new job.

A study undertaken by Robert Half Technology in May, 2007 reported that 70% of employers do some sort of computer-based monitoring. How the information collected from these activities is used is not clear, since we seem to hear comparatively little about employees being reprimanded or dismissed due to what is found in monitoring. Yet, this silence is not especially difficult to understand given how employers are bound to confidentiality, and how employees are out to avoid humiliation, even when the employee may be angered at having been "snooped." Are the manager and employee really going to openly discuss the embarrassing details of a private E-mail or chat, or just quietly push the whole sorry business behind them?

Employers truly do need to understand what is happening with their employees. On the other side, monitoring of communications leaves the employee all the more vulnerable and the boss all the more privileged. Employees don't monitor the boss, do they? To wonder what sensitive information may be known by a boss certainly detracts from our senses of safety and trust, which are basic elements in an environment conducive to getting job done well.

To impose some "separation of powers" on this practice could go a long way toward increasing confidence that data accumulated through monitoring won't be abused. Consider the possibility of electronic monitoring systems securely exporting the data they accumulate to a mediator who is not employed by company management. If a manager decides to examine the monitored data, for whatever reason, the employee has to approve the action explicitly before the mediator is permitted to release the data, when it is then made available to both employer and employee. If these approvals are not given, some sort of arbitration can be had that may result in a ruling for or against the employer. If, despite this protection, there is still a wrongful action taken on the employee, the mediator would be able to act as a distinterested witness in any dispute that may arise.

Who appoints these mediators? Who pays them to work? Community protection of people's rights comes from civil authority, and, as in all matters of civil oversight of business, questions abound. However, in an age where we now turn to electronic networks to share data of all kinds, major issues of privacy versus property arise, and we need to deal with these issues as a society. In the end, everyone will benefit. We will work better when we know there will be some fair play surrounding the data collected about us should questions ever be raised- and employers will know that any oversight they do will be externally validated and have less a chance of falling subject to some expensive lawsuit. We, as a society, will indeed "guard the guards."