Marketing

With increasing technology in today’s workplace, surveillance is of the utmost importance in this day and age. When most people hear the word surveillance, they think of some spy or war movie with the “bad guy” constantly being tracked. This is, to some extent, one definition of the word. However, in today’s work environment I think employees are ignorant of its real meaning, one that does not include cameras or a policing effort to enforce every rule.

Surveillance is simply a process that supervisory figures use to track employee progress. Sure, productivity is a huge driver of such surveillance, but is not the only factor in such monitoring. I think surveillance needs to be a consistent system in which open communication channels are utilized. This can be a variety of different medians, through email, phone, face to face meetings, etc. Not only is this form of surveillance highly effective in the workplace, it is also the cheapest form. As the text mentions, many companies use simple surveillance systems to monitor employees. This costs a great deal to implement and keep running and actually discourages productivity if employees are aware of its use.

Although surveillance is necessary, privacy is a hot topic when it comes to employees. Information and communication technologies have raised various privacy red flags throughout their implementation. My employer, the Department of the Navy, monitors only the websites perused and has a business intelligence tracker that records all contract awards that are in process or finished. The latter is very important when measuring productivity and is a great example of surveillance. I believe that the website monitoring is also effective, even though it can brush with privacy. Even though the government has many blockages of most inappropriate sites, it does not contain all of them. It is important to recognize that the employer owns the computers (most of the time) and other equipment the...