ARGUMENT127 =August Rush=小组第2次作业 by KevinSpacey

KevinSpaceyUID: 2645771

Argument 127
The vice president for human resources at Climpson Industries sent the following recommendation to the company's president.
"In an effort to improve our employees' productivity, we should implement electronic monitoring of employees' Internet use from their workstations. Employees who use the Internet from their workstations need to be identified and punished if we are to reduce the number of work hours spent on personal or recreational activities, such as shopping or playing games. By installing software to detect employees' Internet use on company computers, we can prevent employees from wasting time, foster a better work ethic at Climpson, and improve our overall profits."

KevinSpaceyUID: 2645771

The author argues that in order to improve the company’s overall profits, they should install electronic monitoring system to detect employees’ Internet use. To prove this conclusion, the arguer show us three assumptions that the monitoring system can improve employees’ productivity, the employees who use the Internet should be punished to reduce their hours spent on personal activities, and the overall profits of company will improve if employees do not waste time. These three facets are all questionable and lack support.

The arguer fails to consider the other aspects except for Internet use which may influence the employees’ productivity. Even the Internet use indeed disturb the employees from keeping their mind on work, it is only one among the lots variety of interferential facts but not the only one. Hence, if the company implements electronic monitoring of employees’ Internet use from their workstations, the employees’ productivity may still stay at the same level because they can find other things to do to substitute the Internet using. For example, they could watch video on the computer; they could play single player game; they could talk with each other about their family lives. So the measure that implements monitoring cannot guarantee to improve the employees’ productivity.

Furthermore, the arguer makes the assumption that employees use the Internet from their workstations only for their personal or recreational activities which is not reasonable. The arguer does not provide any evidence to indicate this assumption. Employees can gain important and useful information from the Internet to benefit their work. For economic analysts, they need to know the significant affairs happen all over the world every day. For software architectures, they need to know the latest software technology and the software producers’ dynamic activities. All this kind of information can be easily find from the Internet which makes the employees be willing to use Internet at work. If all the using of Internet need to be punished, the company will not only fail the effort of improving the employees’ productivity but also do harm to the employees’ working efficiency.

Even if this measure could reduce the work hours spent on personal and recreational activities, it may not improve employees’ productivity or even improve the company’s overall profits. The arguer fails to show us the direct relationship between employees’ work time and their productivity. Actually, making employees devote all their time to work may do harm to their productivity. When a person keeps working for a long time, he or she may need to have a break to relax in order to maintain a high work efficiency level. It will also affect the ethic of the company if there is no recreational time at work. If the efficiency of employees and the ethic of company are influenced, how could the overall profits improve?

In sum, to make us believe that installing software to detect employees' Internet use on company computers can improve the overall profits, the arguer should provide more evidence to show the Internet using indeed reduces employees’ productivity. The arguer also needs to consider whether employees’ working time equals to their productivity and the company’s overall profits.