Big Brother makes us sick

Business 2.0 points out that the rise in Big Brother snooping on employee e-mail and web surfing has been accompanied by in increase in absenteeism:

First, while employers have increasingly been taking the Big Brother approach, thanks to software that tracks Internet usage and even lets the boss read a worker’s e-mails, the proportion of absenteeism attributable to personal needs has also been on the rise — almost doubling in 2002 to 21 percent. Notice the lesson here: If you don’t want your people missing work to take care of personal business, maybe it would be better to let them take care of some of that business at work.

The first rule of management is trust, not snoop because you can. Somebody should pass this on to John Chambers.