I get a lot of surveys sent my way in the course of a week. Most of them aren’t all that surprising or newsworthy. This one was different. 

Here’s the headline that grabbed my attention: More than half of all employers have fired workers either for e-mail or Internet abuse, according to the 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey from the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute. It went on to list these other highlights from the study:

• 66 percent of employers are monitoring Internet connections.
• 45 percent of employers are tracking content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard.
• Another 43 percent store and review computer files.
• Of the 43 percent of companies that monitor e-mail, 73 percent use technology tools to automatically monitor e-mail and 40 percent assign an individual to manually read and review e-mail.

I was stunned by these numbers. I know that some companies closely watch and track employees, sometimes to the extreme, but this survey made it seem a lot more widespread than I was aware of.

But then I looked at the fine print—the breakdown of how they did the survey. “Of the 304 U.S. companies that participated,” the press release announcing the study noted,  “27 percent represent companies employing 100 or fewer workers, 101–500 employees (27 percent), 501–1,000 (12 percent), 1,001–2,500 (12 percent), 2,501–5,000 (10 percent) and 5,001 or more (12 percent).”
To put this another way, 54 percent of the companies surveyed—the very businesses doing all the monitoring—have fewer than 500 employees. This skews the study, in my view, because all the small companies I’ve worked for were a lot more obsessed with how workers were spending their time than the larger ones were.

In other words, the monitoring of employees and what they are doing on the computer may not really be increasing. It may be that this study just over-reports what is going on at small companies, while under-reporting what goes on at the bigger ones. It reminds me of the remark usually attributed to Disraeli but often repeated by Mark Twain: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”