A Heartless "Boss"

"Computer monitoring increases worker stress, reduces job satisfaction, and ultimately subverts management's own goal of greater productivity," claim Karen Nussbaum and Virginia duRivage in the magazine Business and Society Review. Indeed, many employees have complained that computer monitoring puts too much pressure on them. The "electronic boss" is producing a crop of stressed-out workers, they say.

Some companies have used computer technology to boost production speed, forcing employees to race to keep up with their machines. Others monitor employees so closely that it has created an atmosphere of paranoia. Time magazine reported on a West Coast airline that uses computers to monitor precisely how many seconds its 400 reservations clerks spend on each phone call and how much time passes between calls. The employees earn demerit points if their calls repeatedly exceed 109 seconds or if they spend more than 12 minutes per day taking restroom breaks beyond the hour allotted for lunch and coffee breaks. Earning 37 demerit points in one year can mean the end of a job.

Systems like that create an adversarial relationship between labor and management, critics say, and make workers feel as if managers are poised over their shoulder, ready to spring on the slightest variation in work speed.

In addition, a 'remote-control boss' can dehumanize the relationship between labor and management. Employees begin to feel that they are working to please a machine-hardly a gratifying experience. Instead of bolstering production, computer monitoring can actually slow it down by taking away an employee's initiative and morale.

"Machines cannot motivate workers, they cannot understand employee problems, and they cannot foster company loyalty," argue Nussbaum and duRivage.

Living With Such a "Boss"

Since love is often not the principle on which the world operates, neither the employee nor the employer may have the best interests of the other at heart. Thus, the "electronic boss" has become a reality. However, both labor and management agree that much can be done to make computer monitoring more effective and less stressful.

For example, managers can give employees advance notification of monitoring so that they don't feel that anyone is spying on them without warning. Some managers recommend that the employees be given free access to any data collected about them.

Henriques suggests that "the period over which employees are monitored should be reasonable, and allowances should be made for normal up-and-down energy cycles." In harmony with this, some employers have found it wise to monitor a worker's performance over a longer period of time, allowing good days and bad days to average out over a period of weeks or months.

Stress is further reduced when workers are permitted to help set realistic standards for performance, rather than letting the computer dictate how fast a job should be done. "Some firms ask employees to help establish behavioral norms at work and thus cut down on the need for monitoring," says Technology Review.