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Computer-Based Monitoring: Common Perceptions and Empirical Results*
Abstract
Computer-based monitoring, the practice of collecting performance information on employees through the computers they use at work, continues to be a popular topic. How much is known about computer-based monitoring as it is practiced in the workplace? Unfortunately, very little, even though much has been written on the subject. This article reports on five case studies of organizations that employ computerbased monitoring to collect performance data on clerical workers. Although all five organizations utilize similar data collection methods and procedures, no two organizations use the data collected in the same ways to evaluate employee performance. Each site reports different levels of employee satisfaction with monitoring, different abilities of employees to balance demands for work quantity and quality, different levels of work-related illnesses, and different perceptions of supervision. Although these results do not appear surprising on the surface, much of the popular literature on computer-based monitoring stresses the negative effects of monitoring on workers, no matter how or where it is implemented. In this study, the simple presence of computerbased monitoring was not enough to explain differences between sites. Rather, other factors, such as which data were used for evaluation and outside economic pressures, helped to explain variations in monitoring and its effects across sites. Computer-based monitoring, like other information technologies, is a malleable technology.
Keywords: Computer-based monitoring, surveillance, work, stress
ISRL Categories: AA0801, A10102, BD0105, HA01
Introduction
Computer-based monitoring, the practice of collecting performance information on employees through the computers they use at work, has emerged as a popular topic in North America in the past decade. Computer-based monitoring was seen as such a serious issue in the 103rd U.S. Congress that bills, which would have made illegal many practices commonly associated with monitoring in the workplace, were introduced in both houses (S.984 and H.R.1900). Articles on workplace surveillance in Macworld in July 1993 (Piller 1993a; 1993b) elicited a great deal of interest, resulting in articles on monitoring in several newspapers and on evening television news shows. The Macworld articles were entered into the record of Congressional hearings Senator Paul Simon (Democrat, Illinois) held on monitoring in the summer of 1993.
How widespread is computer-based monitoring in the workplace, and how much is known about it? According...