When does transparency become big brother? Have your say…

What started as a discussion on LinkedIn about remote working and whether it had become an antiquated practice became a difference of opinion on the use of technology to monitor and control employee behaviour.

There are both hardware and software applications available that will monitor every tiny bit of your technology infrastructure, from your emails and telephone calls down to how many minutes you spent working on a Word document or looking at Facebook.

To the extreme (and we do get information technology support requests for this!) computer systems can be limited to just the one or two applications that are needed to be run by the user, no email or access to the Internet.

Coming back to the LinkedIn discussion, one camp was the opinion that Big Brother was watching in the creepy and snooping around sense of the term.  This had the potential to stifle creativity and impair productivity by discouraging people from a quick time out that might otherwise fuel new ideas and creative juices.

The opposing opinion was that technology can serve as a tool to add transparency to your business; making your team accountable for their actions, and if technology wasn’t saving you money then it would at least be reducing your exposure to unintentionally losing money.

What is Your Opinion?

Are you playing Big Brother in your organisation and to what extreme?  Does it give you a better view as to what is going on and make your business more efficient, or is it just prying into the personal space of your team?

We would love for you to share your opinion with a short survey, which you can complete with the link below.  We’ll publish the results on this blog in about 10 days time.

Take the survey @ http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RPGF5ZL.

Alternatively you can share your opinion using the comment box below.