monitoring employee’s online behavior by companies ethical

Monitoring Employee’s Online Behavior
Covid-19 pandemic has presented new challenges to both the employer and employees. A majority of organizations are allowing their workers to work remotely from home in a bid to contain the spread of the disease. Maintaining social distancing, sanitizing, and wearing of masks is a great challenge for people at the work place. However, organizations are becoming more interested in monitoring their employees as they continue to offer services remotely. This has raised a number of ethical questions as to whether the action of organizations to track the activities of their employees is morally right. Employers are concerned with the productivity of their employees in the sense that they have to produce the same output even though they are working from home since they are paid the same amount. Employees on the other hand are of the view that they have to be given their freedom and privacy. The leading companies in the world, such as Twitter, are encouraging workers to continue working from their homes even after the society reopens. The best performing companies, such as Facebook and Google, are also embracing the same idea of allowing workers to work from home. However, the same companies are on the forefront advocating for employee monitoring and tracking to ensure they are efficient and productive.
Studies show that at least 88% of global organizations have permitted their employees to work remotely from home. The same studies show that organizations have benefited from the new arrangement because workers have more time of up to four-hundred hours per year. The productivity of workers has improved with the new arrangement, but the challenge of employer’s desire to monitor and track the activities of workers. The contents of emails, the activities on social media, online meeting records, time sheets, and utilization of workspace are being monitored closely. Leading companies are buying specialized software used in tracking the activities of workers online. Tattleware, for instance, is one of the software being used to capture the activities of workers in meetings and relying the same to the senior management.