Knowing Enough

Its no surprise that employees cannot escape surveillance by their employers. But the depth of monitoring begs the question - to what end? When does this collection of data cross the line into voyeurism ? 

Email monitoring that once flagged predetermined keywords can now scan every message for emotional cues, giving bosses a heads up if someone's likely to quit, or if they seem to be considering corporate sabotage.

I can understand the part about corporate sabotage though even that is a bit over-zealous and could be subjective and rife with false positive alarm signals. But being likely to quit is another thing altogether. Would it not make more sense to incentivize the boss to keep up retention rates and employee satisfaction numbers? 

I once worked for a company where this was done and it fostered a very healthy competition between peer-level managers to keep their ranking on the leader-board. If you were one of the top-ranked managers, you were likely to attract the best talent from across the organization into your team. That in turn improved your own prospects for career growth.

There is no commonsense in figuring out some malcontent is about to quit when infact the person figuring this out by electronically monitoring "emotional cues" in their emails, is likely the biggest reason they want to quit in the first place. This one of the infinite ways that technology seems to be enabling a general loss of rationality in the world these days