For many years, technology has been used for a variety of purposes in business life. Today, it is a widely-accepted fact that there are enormous advantages of using technology in workplaces. Moreover, it can be said that being able to use technology at a certain level in almost every job field makes applicants stand out from an employer perspective, as these skills enable tasks to be done more effectively. Accordingly, the main goal of the employers is to keep their employees’ intellect active and maintain physical health. These efforts of engaging their attentiveness result in profit. The way to achieve this purpose is through the control of employees via assorted methods. Therefore, benefitting from the advantages of technological developments to control their employees was an approach. Control on workplaces is seen as an inevitable part of business life from past to present; hence, the evolution of control methods and their basic problems can be basically examined in three parts: current ways of control, control with wearable technology as a new method of control and main ethical problems with wearable technology and the reasons behind it. There has been range of concerns about usage of wearable technology on workplaces in all around the world since having different consequences of this control method causes a dilemma whether this method detrimental or useful.
The monitoring of the employees in the workplaces can be seen as necessary due to the risk of performing poorly. However, it can also be abusing to the relaxed working environments as seen throughout the history. Control on workplaces might be seen acceptable because it may push the employees to give their best and as the employers are concerned with increasing company’s productivity, efficiency and profits. However, there might be not only advantages but also disadvantages of controlling employees, because there are variety forms of control. In the present business climate, everything is becoming more digital; therefore it is not an unexpected outcome that monitoring in business life with technology has become widespread. It gives employers instant access to an extensive variety of information about their employees. According to today’s technological developments, it can be classified some existent ways of control on workplaces as old forms. The existent ways of controlling employees can be divided into three parts: Electronic monitoring, employee testing practices, and employment records. Firstly, electronic monitoring includes visual monitoring which consists of cameras, package/bag detectors. Additionally, telephone monitoring provides information about the number of calling and the duration of conversation; computer monitoring which means collecting data and statistics about performance, supervising electronic mails and the time spent on the computer. Another method is viewing the access control systems such as cardkeys and keypads which allows following the employee’s movements. McClelland points out that while hoarders weight down and offload goods from docks in an Amazon storage place, steps of them have tracked; moreover, their spending time and change of position are standardized according to their movements in a pattern of crossing lines of the storage place (Rosenblat,Kneese& Boyd, 2014, p.6). It is an undeniable fact that all companies apply a variety of methods to increase the productivity level of employees and they want to access information about the performance of their employees; therefore, they see the circle time of a process as a measurement of effectiveness. However, the view of employees about these enhancement methods does not match with employers since employees are perceived these as a condition of employment. Secondly, employee testing includes four practices. These are drug testing/blood tests which provides insight to the employee’s medical history; genetic testing that means the DNA analysis of the employee; and ultimately the lie detector testing which aims assessing the employees dependability by inquiring the truth of their answer to certain situations. Also, psychological testing is used to determine personality, general abilities, characteristic features, job performance, etc. Actually, these kinds of controls are developed instead of application forms, references, interviews, etc. (Wright, 1992, p.8). In the light of these information companies need a variety of methods at the stage of choosing their employees; however, acceptance of application these tests might create conflicts from the point of employers because to illustrate, DNA analysis shows us that employees are out of allowable test experiments day by day. The final way of controlling is employment records these records can contain almost every accessible knowledge about the workers, such as previous performance analysis, financial status and some recommendations. Consequently, as Wright indicated, there are already several and extensive ways of control on workplaces and it has been a long-debated issue whether all of these old and existent forms create an oppressive working environment because of surveillance. Furthermore, it is a well-known fact that the main problem with these applications has been ethical concerns from privacy to security. Much of the oppositions stem from employees’ thoughts and anxiety about how data is collected, stored and shared, how existing laws protect privacy interests, who is going to track with caring of ethical values? (Wright, 1992, p.11). As a conclusion, companies should be clear about privacy policies with their employees’ in company matters. That’s how ethical norms does not going to be a problem between employees and administrative group. This application will build up trust in workplace and between people which create a peaceful place for everyone. As an answer of most of these questions, there is The Code of Fair Information Practices which is constituted by The United States Federal Trade Commission to provide informational privacy and data protection. The Code of Fair Information Practices is based on five principles:
1. There must be no personal data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret.
2. There must be a way for a person to find out what information about the person is in a record and how it is used.
3. There must be a way for a person to prevent information about the person that was obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without the person’s consent.
4. There must be a way for a person to correct or amend a record of identifiable information about the person.
5. Any organization creating, maintaining, using, or disseminating records of identifiable personal data must assure the reliability of the data for their intended use and must take precautions to prevent misuses of the data.