The vice president of human resources at Climpson Industries sent the following recommendation to the company s president In an effort to improve our employees productivity we should implement electronic monitoring of employees Internet use from their wor

In the recommendation to the company’s president, the vice president stated that the company should implement an electronic system to monitor their employees’ internet activities and thus enhance the company’s productivity. The vice president has come to this conclusion based on the information that employees waste time by shopping or playing games during the work hour, and the monitoring system can identify them. However, before this recommendation can be properly evaluated, three assumptions need to be examined properly.

First of all, the vice president assumes that the employees are wasting their time on the internet by playing games or buying things instead of working, and that’s why productivity is low. Perhaps, this is not the case. Maybe they are working timely but the company’s machines and instruments are not that efficient, perhaps they are too old to function properly and so, they produce low output for a given input which results in overall low productivity. Further, may be the company does not provide adequate training to its employees – so employees do not know about the new methods and techniques and still using some outmoded methods which results in low output. If either of the above scenarios has merit, then the argument of the vice president is significantly weakened.

Secondly, the vice president assumes that the software using for monitoring the employees’ online activities will certainly detect the culprits and stop them from wasting company’s time. May be this is not true. Perhaps, when they will come to know about the installation of the software, they look for a way to circumvent the software. May be one of the employees is efficient in handling software, and he finds out a method to continue playing games or online shopping even after installing a monitoring system. Perhaps he will inform all and ultimately everyone will continue their deeds while the vice president thinks that they are not wasting time. It is also possible that after knowing about the company’s plan, they will not waste time online to avoid getting caught, instead, they might start using the internet in their own cellphone. Since no apps is installed in there, they will go undetected. If the above cases are true, the conclusion of the vice president does not hold water.

Finally, the vice president assumes that the cost of installing and maintaining the software will be less than the increased productivity of the workers. However, this is not necessarily true. Modern software could be prohibitively expensive. Maybe the price of the monitoring computer program is more than 1 million dollar while the incremented employees’s efficacy worths only several thousand dollars. Besides, maybe the maintenance cost of the software is quite high - every year the company might have to spend a substantial amount of money to keep the software updated whereas perhps the employees no longer waste their time in unnecessary online browsing. If these are true, then the vice president’s recommendation that installing a software will increase company’s profit becomes less persuasive.

In conclusion, the argument, as it stands now, is considerably flawed because of its dependency on several unfounded assumptions. If the vice president can debunk the above assumptions and presents more evidence, it will be possible to fully evaluate the viability of the proposed recommendation that by installing monitoring software, company’s profit can be increased.