Choose any 2 and feedback their opinion.

1. The world today is a highly connected and there is not much that cannot be monitored or reported on. The first thing that comes to mind is the call center for my company. It is an inbound call center that handles approximately 16,000 phone calls a day spanning four different call centers in the North America. The call center technicians are monitored very closely to capitalize on every possible free second. The line for ethical data collection can skew in several different ways as to what can be considered ethical or un-ethical. Data is being collected on these workers from the minute they log into the phone till the minute they log out at the end of their shifts. Throughout the day technicians have different buttons on their phone like ACW (After Call Work), Projects, and Personal that they use whenever they are not waiting for the next phone call. All of these are monitored through out the call center 24/7 365 days a year. Of all of them I feel that the personal is the one that teeters between ethical and unethical. Currently, throughout seven-and-a-half-hour shift, call center techs are only allotted five minutes of personal time. I understand that this is something that should be monitored, but to what level should it be addressed? Should employees be questioned if they are taking longer amounts personal time?

I think that all employees should be aware of the data that is collected upon them in a given day. The knowledge that something is monitored can sometimes avoid abuse by employees. People need to know what the boundaries are so that we know what is expected.

There are several types of control that should be expected like schedule adherence and strong work ethics.

2.In the work place, it makes sense to and is efficient to monitor workers so that managers can assess how to improve performance, working conditions, and customer experience. Collecting data on behaviors or patterns of workers should be ethical as long as the workers are informed that they are under surveillance. This information should be kept confidential and may only be shared between the observers (supervisors) and the worker in question. Managers can use this data to evaluate workers and provide feedback or suggestions for the worker. Collecting information and monitoring employees becomes unethical when it invade their privacy. For instance, employers should not track how many times an employee goes to the restroom or for how long they are in there... unless there is reasonable suspicion that the employee is not simply attending to his/her biological needs. Phone conversations made on personal phones and on personal time should not be monitored. Collecting this information is only ethical if it relates to improving the company and its employees. People have a right to privacy and society has an agreement that certain things should be kept a mystery (like going to the bathroom). I would expect managers to place controls in effect such as checks and balances and feedback regarding the job performance. I would also expect controls such as SOPs so that employees know how they should be performing specific tasks. I think it would be smart to have communication between employees and customers monitored and tracked, whether through email, phone conversation, written. This way, manager are able to see how employees are treating customers, conflict can be handled accordingly, and issues with products can be traced back to a day/time and employee.

3. All employees should be monitored by their company, however, the monitoring should be clearly explained to the employees for it to be ethical. Keeping track on how the employee uses their time and how much of the time is used on on-task behavior is crucial to a company on whether or not the company could be ran more efficiently. If management sees that an employee spends most of their time at work on their phone or off task in another manner, then they should talk to that employee about using their time at work on-task. However, there are some behaviors that would be unethical for management to limit or comment on, unless there is sufficient enough cause for concern. For example, the employee's use of the bathroom should not be limited unless of course they end up spending more time in the bathroom than doing their job. Also, smoke breaks, as long as they're not abused, should not be limited either.

There should be well defined and clearly explained operating procedures that the employee is informed of at the point of hire. These are the behaviors and actions that the manager will most likely monitor and the ones that will be corrected if not followed. Otherwise, if it is a behavior that is not discussed than it should not be collected or monitored unless it hurts the performance of the employee and company. These procedures should also be posted somewhere the employees can reference when needed.