Trouble with the Law
But can a company snoop without telling its workers in advance? "Employers absolutely have the right to set whatever terms of employment they want to, assuming they're not discriminatory," explains Robert Lass, director of consulting services at Gleeson, Sklar, Sawyers & Cumpata, an accounting and management consultant firm.
Cathleen Sullivan, a principal at RedHawk, which specialises in ethics consulting, amplifies the point. "It's naïve for people to come to the workplace with an expectation of privacy," she says. "Of course, employees come to work feeling like their desk and their office is their sanctuary. But understand: Employers have their foot to the fire. They are responsible for their employees' actions."
In some industries the stakes are too high to stand by and do nothing. Mark Woodall, MIS manager at ERMI Environmental Laboratories in Allen, Texas, has to be so careful about his work that it verges on paranoia. "The Environmental Protection Agency has got one hand down our shorts, so we have to really make sure we're on the straight and narrow around here," he says. ERMI charges clients between US$500 and $10,000 to test water and soil samples and issue written reports. Deliberately fudging these test results is a criminal offense.
"The EPA will march in here with holstered side arms. I know that other labs have gotten into trouble because of a few bad seeds on the inside, and I wanted to make sure we didn't have that same problem here," Woodall says. It's critical that he be able to identify more than simply the Web sites his staff are surfing, but also every keystroke that goes into their reports, as well as date and time stamps to show when reports have been modified.
To keep a sharp eye on all this, he installed WinWhatWhere's Investigator software on several of the computers used by his 50-person staffâ€"but he's not telling which ones. "I didn't tell the staff which brand of software I was using, or what it was capable of," he explains. "I didn't want them to know what the boundaries were." He did, however, tell employees that they're being watched. "I don't particularly want to find problems. My sole intent is not to catch people and fire them. I think that's a misuse of the software, but you have to protect yourself legally."
