Reference no: EM132167379

The researchers measured the impact of software that monitors employee-level theft and sales transactions, before and after the technology was installed, at 392 restaurants in 39 states. The restaurants were in five “casual dining” chains."

"The savings from the theft alerts themselves were modest, $108 a week per restaurant. However, after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of $2,982 a week, or about 7 percent."

"The impact, the researchers say, came not from firing workers engaged in theft, but mostly from their changed behavior. Knowing they were being monitored, the servers not only pulled back on any unethical practices, but also channeled their efforts into, say, prompting customers to have that dessert or a second beer, raising revenue for the restaurant and tips for themselves."

"In the research, the data sets were sizable. For example, there were more than 630,000 transactions by servers tracked and collected each week over the course of the project."

Based on this research, do you think employee monitoring and surveillance are actually good things? Should companies employ more strategies to monitor employee behavior? What are the drawbacks to employee monitoring? Using the ethical models that we are learning in this class (Utilitarianism, Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Ethic of Care), is employee monitoring an ethically sound practice?