Washington Post: Facebook all day long? Be careful: your boss can follow you

    I offer readers a translation of the article “Stare at Facebook all day? Watch out: Your boss could be monitoring you, ” published in The Washington Post.

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    Meriel Carrer is the CEO of Patriot Scuba in Occocan, Virginia, USA. This property organizes diving trips from Washington County to one of two nearby quarries. Two years ago, her son Will, an army officer who studied cyber security at a college, told her about ActivTrak, a new software that would allow her to monitor employee computer desktops. She thought this was a good way to run an office while away.

    Meriel told four of her regular employees that she was monitoring their computers. They were not opposed. She says that she has not received any objections, and considers the use of such software to be a precautionary measure to ensure that employees, many of whom work with their children on duty, do not visit non-work sites.

    “We are a family-oriented enterprise, so we want to be sure that our employees visit family-oriented sites,” she says.

    Low-cost controls, such as ActivTrak , Spector 360 and Workexaminer.com , have made monitoring available even to the smallest enterprises and allow managers to monitor the activity of employee computers, including secretly.

    The danger is that managers may place too much trust in such technology, draw hasty conclusions and use it, avoiding more meaningful conversations with employees.

    “Any performance management technology without good management skills can be very dangerous,” said Ken Oler, lead global engagement specialist at Aon Hewitt, a human resources consultancy.

    ActivTrak's online service, developed by Birch Grove Software from Dallas, gives executives the current image of an employee’s computer screen. Images are displayed on a panel resembling a security camera display. 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 loafer. Spector 360, a monitoring service offered by Spectorsoft from Florida, allows employers to detect the input of certain combinations of 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 how employees manage their time, indicating which sites have been 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 monitor workers remotely can use the “invisible remote installer” available 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 knowledge of the employee.

    This type of employee monitoring is not new to the Internet age. A survey of 304 small and large enterprises, conducted in 2007 by the American Association of Executives and the Institute for Electronic Politics, found that 45% of executives track site content, keyboard presses, and time spent at the keyboard.

    “Even if your boss claims that he is not following you, you must allow this opportunity,” said Nancy Flynn, founder and executive director of the e-policy institute, which advises and educates entrepreneurs on electronic compatibility issues.

    The emergence of new technology means that monitoring employees is not the sole responsibility of government services and large corporations. Small businesses can also control their employees for free or for a small fee. ActivTrak is provided free of charge to those who need only three “agents” (as the company calls the monitoring tool installed on one computer). It will cost $ 34 per month if you need to keep track of 5 employees, and larger enterprises can pay $ 199 a 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 the company is aware of the presence of customers who do not. For others, just mentioning the observation is enough to scare employees off 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, believing that their actions are closely monitored for regulatory reasons; in other cases, monitoring may 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, Aon Hewitt Specialist.

    “This technology in the hands of a poor leader can have devastating consequences. In the hands of the good, it can be really useful. ”

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