Easy as P.I.

Have you looked over your shoulder recently? Have a quick peek. Anybody watching you? No?

Good. Then read on. And for God’s sake, you better be reading from a colleague’s computer.

Spying in the workplace is commonplace now, although most hesitate to call it spying. Please, call it productivity tracking.

It ranges from the vaguely understandable — anonymous tracking of websites visited during company time — to the downright disturbing — watching employees through webcams at home or placing tracking devices on their cars.

We’ve done a little snooping of our own to see what’s on the market out there for anybody wishing to get even more intimately acquainted with their staff. Remember, this stuff is for your eyes only. If anybody asks, we were never here.

First, for the traditionalists among us, private investigators are still a thriving business, and not just for impending divorcees and hard-boiled dames.

Why, IKEA France spent nearly half a million Euros on private investigators alone, poking around into the “morality” of employees and customers. They then used that information to “quell workplace grievances” and to prompt resignations.

Of course, if they really knew their film noir cliches, they’ have earmarked the employees as bad news as soon as they walked through the front door smoking a filterless Camel.

Modern tec-nology

Here’s a couple of places to get you started:

Snoopers and sleuths available at the click of a button.

Of course, hiring a PI is a bit old hat these days. And frankly, most of your co-workers are probably too boring to be followed. They aren’t in dive bars on a late night, selling corporate secrets from inside their trench coat. They’re sitting in their underwear and badmouthing you on social media.

That whining noise you can hear is Humphrey Bogart spinning in his grave.

Your best bet is to woo them with a nice company phone or laptop stuffed to the gills with spyware, or better yet to distract them with cake while you put it on their own phone.

The sky’s the limit with what these things can do these days — you can see everything they write, all their photos, e-mails, calls, their location. Scary. But cool.

You have bags of choices. See here for the pick of the litter.

Your final option is a British classic: CCTV. A stalwart of Big Brothers everywhere, installing cameras is a legal and pleasantly invasive way to keep employees on the straight and narrow.

It’s fine so long as you keep the cameras out of the toilets. But you weren’t think of doing that, right?

The UK has the dubious honour of being world leaders in CCTV technology. Here’s just two places to peruse at your leisure.

We hope you use this information wisely and legally. For our agents in the field, your operational updates are contained in the microdot at the end of this sentence.

About the author

Jerome Langford

Jerome is a graduate in Philosophy from St Andrews, who alternately spends time writing about HR and staring wistfully out of windows, thinking about life’s bigger questions: Why are we here? How much lunch is too much lunch? What do you mean exactly by ‘final warning’?