All the moves are written down: how and why do companies monitor employees

Modern technologies of control over personnel have long been not limited to surveillance cameras in the office. Today, the work discipline is guarded by a variety of software solutions, so that employers can track literally every step of the employees.

When at the beginning of the last century Henry Ford offered his employees a high salary, he also set very strict requirements for them, the BBC tells. If a factory employee did not behave like an exemplary family man and an exemplary citizen, he could easily be fired - sometimes the company even hired private detectives to find out what her employees are doing outside of working hours.

Today many employers also strive to know everything about their staff, the benefit of technology development has made this task much easier. For example, special programs track each movement with a mouse or press keys on working computers, and even office coffee machines, by scanning badges of employees, collect data on how often they go to drink coffee.

The analysis of these huge data sets is a separate growing market, the volume of which can reach $ 1 billion by 2022. More and more companies use such scoring programs in their personnel policy - these systems help not only to measure employee performance, but also to understand how they interact between by yourself.

Modern technology also stands guard over the health of staff. Companies encourage employees to lead a lively lifestyle by monitoring their activity through applications, smart watches or fitness bracelets - the number of kilometers traveled directly affects their scoring scores.

In general, the data collected by employers can be divided into two categories. The first is metadata from working tools like e-mail, phone or corporate messenger. The second is data from other sources, for example, sensors that monitor the movement of the office, or badges with built-in microphones (they do not record conversations, but general data on speech activity - how often the employee talks, how often he is interrupted, etc.)

However, all these systems raise a lot of questions, and privacy is by no means the only one. According to critics, quantitative methods can not objectively assess the usefulness and prospects of the employee, and staff scoring can provoke wrong decisions. For example, a long conversation over a cup of coffee can be both a negative factor if the colleagues are having a personal conversation, and positive if they are discussing a new working idea.