Work stress

1. Work Place Privacy
• Work place Privacy can be defined as “Freedom for employees from
unauthorized intrusion from the employers’ or the general right of the
Individual to be let alone”.
• Privacy at home or at our place is of course different from the one at our work
place.
• Work place is common to many other people and obviously owned and
controlled by other people. But still, there is a level of privacy the employees
has to maintain, in order to perform their job in an effective manner.

2. The major issues of work place privacy and its violations are as follows:
• Electronic surveillance and Video Monitoring of employees at work place
• Monitoring of emails (including personal emails) of the employees through
the office server system
• Tapping of phone calls of employees during office hours
• Credit check on employees
• Seeking personal information of employees

3. •In USA, invasion of privacy is considered to be a major infringement
of individual rights.
•In India, the MNCs and industries with western ties like BPOs, KPOs
and Software companies are the major users of softwares to monitors
the employees.
•The popular softwares like “spector soft” and “VPI empower suite”
are available in the market which are specially designed to monitor the
desktops and phone calls of employees in the organisation.

4. On the other side of the coin, employers justify the surveillance or monitoring by
stating the following reasons:
• Monitoring employees helps identifying genuine and honest employees
• Surveillance improves productivity
• It helps in keeping a check on thefts in the organisation –may it be materialistic or
knowledge data base
• When employees know that they are under observation, they try to act cordial and
amicable to co-workers and conflicts are reduced
• Cuts out the misuse of internet facilities & Cuts our computer slack time
• Keeps the misuse of company resources

5. • we cannot say altogether that monitoring the employees is wrong.
• As in the present scenario, where technology rules and day- by- day new
softwares are invented to do millions of things from your desk top, the
concern over the sustainability and reputation of the organisation becomes
vital.
• The employees, particularly those who have negative thoughts about the
organisation, may misuse the organisations possessions or name to damage
them. For instance, let us imagine a scenario.

6. • An employee who is in cash transactions of a financial company may use the
company email id to create a rumour about funds manipulation in the
company.
• There may be investigations later, may be the culprit gets punishment, but
the damage done will be irrevocable. Once the goodwill and the reputation
of the financial company gone, it’s gone forever.
• If there is a surveillance system to monitor the emails, this problem would
have been stopped before happening.

7. • Apart from the data base security concerns, the work time wastedin
internet surfing is also a major issue in work place monitoring.
• An article from IIM, Bangalore mentions that approximately 8 lakh
rupees is calculated to be wasted on cyber slack time by a software
engineer in India.