ABSTRACT

One of the fundamental responsibilities of a manager is to supervise or oversee the work of employees. The word supervisor comes from two Latin words that literally mean “look over.” When the employees who directly report to a manager work in the same physical space as the manager, supervision can be accomplished by looking out over the employees. Managers in the contemporary working world are often physically separated from those employees who report directly to them and, even when they are in the same physical location, the manager has many other things to occupy his time besides literally watching his employees. Advances in technology have made it possible in many cases for a manager to have very detailed records of each employee’s actions throughout the work day. Technology has also made it possible for managers to know more about the activities of their employees away from work than ever before. Overseeing the work of others can mean very different things depending on who those others are and what work they are doing. It is one thing to supervise the work of a group of data entry clerks and quite another thing to oversee the work of a group of field sales people or long-haul truck drivers. Very different approaches are used in overseeing the work of servers and busboys in a restaurant than in overseeing the work of senior executives who report to a CEO. In all cases, the responsibility of the manager includes assigning and coordinating the work of direct subordinates and reviewing the results of that work. A data entry clerk who is out of the office for a week (assuming the work is done at the office and not from home) presents a different situation than a long-haul truck driver who is not in the office for a week because he is delivering a load, or a Vice President of Sales who is not in the home office for a

week because she is visiting regional sales offices. Checking up on the physical whereabouts of the clerk after an hour might be a reasonable supervisory action, whereas checking on the whereabouts of the truck driver or the Vice President of Sales in the same time frame might not. This very general discussion of what constitutes supervision sets the background for our discussion of privacy.