Big Brother

I wrote a bit about this in some of my other posts about McDonald's, but I wanted to focus on a few other concepts here and tie in the Baase reading. Everyone knows that computers were a huge advancement in terms of productivity and the possibility for future improvement is now almost limitless. However, the ways that employers are using computers to stifle creativity and monitor employees is a problem. The problem for employers is that they allow workers much more freedom than they previously had. Freedom to talk to friends on instant messenger, send personal emails, browse websites, and play games. Allowing these sorts of freedoms is certainly detrimental to the bottom line and should not be tolerated in most organizations. However, the problem for employees is that their organizations can now monitor every single thing they do and can even hold them accountable for missing their keystroke quota or failing to respond to a prompt in time. I worked at Merrill Lynch last summer and they blocked almost every website that wasn’t pertinent to the company. I think that this sort of control is fine, it prevents workers from goofing off on company time. However, according to Baase, when workers are held accountable for every single move they make, aside from it being an invasion of privacy, they suffer from unnecessary stress, boredom, and low morale. Excuse me for this next comment, I’m an HOD major (probably the only one in the class), but to increase worker productivity, stifling their creativity is counterintuitive. People work differently and most people don’t meet their potential under extreme surveillance. In order to truly increase productivity in the long run, companies should work to increase employee commitment and shared vision, possibly by offering incentives to do their work and do it well, rather than by monitoring every move the employees make.