There is such a thing as pervasive employee monitoring. This happens when the boss is either too suspicious or the employee is too suspect.  There is relatively inexpensive technology to appease the paranoid boss, too. To track the physical presence of employees when the whereabouts and itinerary of such employees become a cause for concern, there is the GPS (global positioning system) and RFID (radio frequency identification) tracking technologies.

Employers with mobile phones that have GPS features can easily and instantly track the exact physical location of an employee. For a more advanced tracking technology, Omron offers an RFID system that helps manufacturing firms track an employee’s exact movement throughout the day.

Business justifies their employee surveillance policies as business wisdom. Business would always want to maximize its resources and operations, as well as optimize employee performance. Employee monitoring helps to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and operational risk factors. These are just some of the benefits of employee monitoring. With advances in technology, the cost of monitoring employees has been dramatically reduced. Data, too, has become easy to analyze and facilitate.

The legitimacy of physical presence tracking is, in fact, a highly controversial and debatable issue. Employee monitoring can be very controversial. There have been raging debates on the ethical, moral, and legal attributes of such an effort. Often, employees see themselves at a disadvantage and their rights presumably infringed.

What is important is that any company policy on employee monitoring should be implemented across the board – from management to rank and file. Usually, upper management wants these restrictions removed from them. When this happens, employee morale is definitely affected.

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Via Inside-Logger Blog