With the development of new computer technologies, Internet and mobile telecommunication systems, monitoring the employee’s activities at workplace as well as tracking the employer-owned mobile phones by using special applications or GPS devices, has become a common practice among employers.

How is staff monitoring carried out?

“From my personal experience, I can say that approximately 90% of the companies with a headcount of no less than 2 monitor their employees’ activities at the workplace. Regardless to the origins of the employer, each has developed a more or less performing staff surveillance system. Some of the companies use special computer applications while others just appoint a person to perform these tasks”, said Bogdan Toth, general manager of HR4U recruiter.

Used both by state-owned companies and multinational or medium firms, the special computer software previously installed in the employee’s terminal is the most popular monitoring solution.

The application keeps track of used programs, web content and time spent accessing and using them. In other words, all programs opened to fulfill your work-related activities and the amount of time spent surfing these web sites are collected in an electronic report and sent at the end of each work day to the employer’s computer.

These applications offer both individual reports and collective reports (company-wide, or department-wide) structured as: top most active employees, top most visited web sites, top employees who spent the most surfing online.

An analysis of productivity can be enclosed to the statistics report which enables the employer to visualize the productivity percentage of your activities.

Software makers say these applications neither review nor retain the electronic mail messages or instant messaging, but only gather statistics related to the amount of ti