WHEN you signed on the dotted line, how much of the small print in your employment contract did you actually read? Perhaps you glanced at the paragraph about “reasonable” unpaid overtime and even made it down to the 12 lines forbidding sexual liaisons with colleagues.

Controlling behaviour in the workplace is becoming a key part of protecting corporate brand equity and employers have turned to technology in order to keep an eye on you.

Employee monitoring, like pest control, is serious business. In 44 per cent of large US firms, staff are employed to monitor outbound e-mails, according to a survey of 140 senior executives for the software company Proofpoint. Investment banks such as Merrill Lynch are even more protective about market-sensitive information and prevent employees accessing home e-mail accounts, external message boards and chatrooms from work.

Outbound e-mail is one of the most sensitive and problematic areas for corporations. Alyn Hockey, technical director of Clearswift, which produces security software for e-mail and the internet, explains: “Initially it was about stopping viruses and spam; then organisations wanted products to stop employees from wasting time and damaging productivity; now, companies are beginning to see the bigger picture and be more careful about what is being sent via e-mail.”

Employee privacy is protected by legislation, including the Human Rights Act, which prevents out-and-out, big brother-style snooping, but as Simon Halberstam, the head of internet and e-commerce law at Sprecher, Grier and Halberstam, points out, employers have rights too. “Employers have to make sure that they inform employees about company policy on matters under the Human Rights Act, Data Protection Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. If the employee doesn’t comply with the terms of his contract or employee handbook, employers can act.” And act they do: 63 per cent of companies have dismissed staff for misuse of the internet, according to a survey of 488 UK organisations by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

When it comes to monitoring employees on performance, Microsoft UK thinks that the perception of the employee as a ticking time bomb has gone too far. Recent research by Dr Carsten Sorensen at the London School of Economics, sponsored by the software giant, says that excessive monitoring is affecting productivity as employees react to guidelines rather than customers. In short, it’s time to return to trust.

“We cannot assume as white collar workers (that) we have complete freedom. However, bosses cannot manage as they have before, driven by command and control,” Sorensen says. People are not objects in a supply chain, he argues. Instead, employers should try allowing workers to “create and share knowledge in self-organising networks of inter- dependent colleagues”.

In the meantime, technology will continue to plug the gap between managers and workers. Instant messaging, which is designed to hop over firewalls, is the new frontier in employee monitoring. “It’s like the cat and mouse game of espionage,” says Hockey about software development. “Once you fix a problem, someone gets around it.”

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