Drug tests can also be inaccurate, and show false positives, and are ineffective for more dangerous 'hard' drugs that have a shorter half-life in the body than 'soft' drugs like marijuana.
Many extremely successful companies do not use employee workplace surveillance such as Google. Google's corporate philosophy is to keep employees happy at work. So what if a productive employee updates his or her Facebook page at 3pm, but stays late, and is productive, while emailing his or her coworkers in ways that blend social life and corporate chat? For the new generation, barriers between personal and work life are more permeable. Also, when more employers expect workers to do work at home, it is frustrating to be barred from doing even the most minor personal business at work, and being taken to task for 'time theft.'
Better not to hire employees you do...
No surveillance techniques will be perfect, and good employees penalized for minor infractions will only want to leave the company. The use of such technology assumes that the employee wants to do as little as possible, with as little
ethics as possible. When given a choice the employee will leave the company for a
place where he or she is not constantly monitored. Productivity and quality of work are the appropriate methods of judging workers, not constant watchfulness.
There is also the final, legal concern -- where does monitoring end? Some employees have sued employers who did not know where to draw the line, such as employers who were monitoring employees in the company restrooms. Electronic surveillance law, because of the newness of the technology is still a work in progress, and not using surveillance may be less of a legal 'headache' than becoming embroiled in the inevitable controversies that will
play themselves out in the
court system.
