Washington Post: Sit on Facebook all day? Be careful: your boss can keep an eye on you
I offer readers a translation of the article “Stare at Facebook all day? Watch out: Your boss could be monitoring you ” , published in Washington Post.
Meriel Carrer is the head of the Patriot Scuba Company in Occock, Virginia, USA. This establishment organizes trips for diving enthusiasts from Washington County to one of two nearby quarries. Two years ago, her son Will, an army officer who had studied cybersecurity at a college, told her about ActivTrak, a new software that would allow her to follow the desktops of employees' computers. She thought it was a good way to manage the office while away.
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Meriel told her four full-time employees that she was monitoring their computers. They were not against. She says she has not received any objections, and considers the use of such software as a precautionary measure to ensure that employees, many of whom work on duty, interact with children, do not visit non-work related sites.
“We are a family-oriented enterprise, so we want to be sure that our employees visit family-oriented websites,” she says.
Inexpensive controls, such as ActivTrak , Spector 360 and Workexaminer.com , made monitoring available to even the smallest enterprises and allow managers to monitor the activity of employee computers, including secretly.
The danger is that managers can be too trusting of such technology, make hasty conclusions and use it, avoiding more meaningful conversations with employees.
“Any performance management technology in the absence of good managerial skills can be very dangerous,” said Ken Ohler, lead specialist for global collaboration at human resource consulting at Aon Hewitt.
The online service ActivTrak, developed by Birch Grove Software from Dallas, gives managers a current screen image of an employee’s computer. Images are displayed on a panel resembling the display of security cameras. Managers have the ability to send pop-up messages about the need to return to work, which appear in the corner of the screen of an unsuspecting slacker. Spector 360, a monitoring service offered by Spectorsoft from Florida, allows employers to detect typing in certain characters on the keyboard, notifying the IT manager and making an instant screen shot as evidence when a certain word is added to a text document or email.
Employers can receive regular performance reports showing employees how they manage their time, indicating which sites were given the most time and whether the browser is open.
But monitoring should not stop when an employee leaves the office. Employers who want to track workers working remotely can use the “invisible remote installer” in ActivTrak to install this service on any computer on the company's network.
If the manager has a network connection and administrator rights for this computer, he can access the machine without the employee’s knowledge.
This type of employee monitoring is not new to the Internet era. A survey of 304 small and large enterprises, conducted in 2007 by the American Association of Executives and the e-policy institute, found that 45% of managers track site content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard.
“Even if your boss claims that he is not following you, you need to allow this opportunity,” said Nancy Flynn, founder and executive director of the e-policy institute, which deals with consulting and educating entrepreneurs on electronic compatibility issues.
The emergence of a new technology means that employee monitoring is not the prerogative of government services and large corporations. Small businesses can also control their employees for free or for a small fee. The ActivTrak program is provided free of charge to those who need only three “agents” (as the company calls a monitoring tool installed on one computer). It will cost $ 34 per month if you need to keep track of 5 employees, while larger enterprises can pay $ 199 per month and keep track of 50 employees.
Most employers using this service do not pay for it. Of the 31,203 firms worldwide using ActivTrak, only 7% use the paid version.
But the way to use this software (whether to inform employees that they are being monitored, and what to do with the data received from the program) depends on the manager. ActivTrak encourages its users to inform their employees that they are being monitored, but companies are aware of the presence of customers who do not. For others, the mere mention of observation is enough to scare employees away from Facebook.
ActivTrak is positioned as a means to increase productivity, but its impact on the morale of the company depends on how managers use the program. Some employees, for example, in the financial sector, perceive this as normal, considering that their actions are closely monitored for regulatory reasons; and in other cases, monitoring can drive a wedge between management and employees. “At the heart of all this is trust. Does the employer trust the employee? What does he want to show the employee by monitoring? ”, Says Oler, specialist Aon Hewitt.
“This technology in the hands of a bad leader can be devastating. In the hands of the good, it can be really useful. ”
Meriel Carrer is the head of the Patriot Scuba Company in Occock, Virginia, USA. This establishment organizes trips for diving enthusiasts from Washington County to one of two nearby quarries. Two years ago, her son Will, an army officer who had studied cybersecurity at a college, told her about ActivTrak, a new software that would allow her to follow the desktops of employees' computers. She thought it was a good way to manage the office while away.
')
Meriel told her four full-time employees that she was monitoring their computers. They were not against. She says she has not received any objections, and considers the use of such software as a precautionary measure to ensure that employees, many of whom work on duty, interact with children, do not visit non-work related sites.
“We are a family-oriented enterprise, so we want to be sure that our employees visit family-oriented websites,” she says.
Inexpensive controls, such as ActivTrak , Spector 360 and Workexaminer.com , made monitoring available to even the smallest enterprises and allow managers to monitor the activity of employee computers, including secretly.
The danger is that managers can be too trusting of such technology, make hasty conclusions and use it, avoiding more meaningful conversations with employees.
“Any performance management technology in the absence of good managerial skills can be very dangerous,” said Ken Ohler, lead specialist for global collaboration at human resource consulting at Aon Hewitt.
The online service ActivTrak, developed by Birch Grove Software from Dallas, gives managers a current screen image of an employee’s computer. Images are displayed on a panel resembling the display of security cameras. Managers have the ability to send pop-up messages about the need to return to work, which appear in the corner of the screen of an unsuspecting slacker. Spector 360, a monitoring service offered by Spectorsoft from Florida, allows employers to detect typing in certain characters on the keyboard, notifying the IT manager and making an instant screen shot as evidence when a certain word is added to a text document or email.
Employers can receive regular performance reports showing employees how they manage their time, indicating which sites were given the most time and whether the browser is open.
But monitoring should not stop when an employee leaves the office. Employers who want to track workers working remotely can use the “invisible remote installer” in ActivTrak to install this service on any computer on the company's network.
If the manager has a network connection and administrator rights for this computer, he can access the machine without the employee’s knowledge.
This type of employee monitoring is not new to the Internet era. A survey of 304 small and large enterprises, conducted in 2007 by the American Association of Executives and the e-policy institute, found that 45% of managers track site content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard.
“Even if your boss claims that he is not following you, you need to allow this opportunity,” said Nancy Flynn, founder and executive director of the e-policy institute, which deals with consulting and educating entrepreneurs on electronic compatibility issues.
The emergence of a new technology means that employee monitoring is not the prerogative of government services and large corporations. Small businesses can also control their employees for free or for a small fee. The ActivTrak program is provided free of charge to those who need only three “agents” (as the company calls a monitoring tool installed on one computer). It will cost $ 34 per month if you need to keep track of 5 employees, while larger enterprises can pay $ 199 per month and keep track of 50 employees.
Most employers using this service do not pay for it. Of the 31,203 firms worldwide using ActivTrak, only 7% use the paid version.
But the way to use this software (whether to inform employees that they are being monitored, and what to do with the data received from the program) depends on the manager. ActivTrak encourages its users to inform their employees that they are being monitored, but companies are aware of the presence of customers who do not. For others, the mere mention of observation is enough to scare employees away from Facebook.
ActivTrak is positioned as a means to increase productivity, but its impact on the morale of the company depends on how managers use the program. Some employees, for example, in the financial sector, perceive this as normal, considering that their actions are closely monitored for regulatory reasons; and in other cases, monitoring can drive a wedge between management and employees. “At the heart of all this is trust. Does the employer trust the employee? What does he want to show the employee by monitoring? ”, Says Oler, specialist Aon Hewitt.
“This technology in the hands of a bad leader can be devastating. In the hands of the good, it can be really useful. ”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/254145/
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