An array of software products has flooded the market promising to help employers rein in time-wasting on the company dime. The class of applications aimed at controlling employee Web surfing – believed to be the top time-waster in the workplace – is one of the fastest growing enterprise software sales categories, industry insiders say. The wide range of software tools available for this purpose range from key-loggers to full-suite identity access management applications. Canadian law leans heavily on the side of employers – allowing them to retrieve data from computers they own. But legality aside, analysts note there are ethical issues to be aware of, and while employee monitoring benefits some businesses, it is not necessarily for everyone. Culture of respect Employee privacy is governed in Canada by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act or PIPEDA. The Act is designed to protect employee information from being leaked outside the company, not from scrutiny by their managers. Because a company owns the computers employees use, it's within its rights to access the data, notes James Quin, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, a London, Ont.-based analyst firm. Quin compares this to ownership of other office equipment: “If I come in every weekend to run off 1,000 colour flyers because I hold rave parties, I can be fired for that.' However, while staff activity monitoring in certain circumstances may be warranted, industry observers also say firms should be careful that they don't step over the line. Last year researchers at a symposium hosted by Canada's privacy commissioner today called on legislators and employers to strengthen employee privacy guarantees and to anticipate the implications of emerging technologies that threaten privacy rights. No matter how employers choose to watch employees, deploying the software in a way that is transparent is crucial, experts say. This means informing employees they are being monitored is still important, even if not strictly required by law. If employees discover they are being watched surreptitiously, it can breed contempt. “Be respectful of your team and explain why it's being put to use,” says Adam Schran CEO of Philadelphia-based monitoring software vendor Ascentive LLC. “You won't want to use it in a culture of mistrust and disrespect.” Spying vs. reporting The most basic monitoring software allows managers to directly spy on their employees. Key-logging software simply records every key typed into a computer for later review. Other types of software work by outright blocking of Web sites and of e-mail with certain key words. “These types of solutions are the most basic ones out there and they get a bad rap as being an invasion of employee privacy,” Quin says. Schran says his company's BeAware corporate edition attempts to move the focus away from micro-managing and blocking access. Instead, he says, the program pushes information in the form of reports to a manager who can see the big picture of what's happening on office desktops. http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=47032
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Use employee monitoring tools with caution, say Canadian experts
