Part 1: After completing this week’s reading assignments and lectures, write a 250-word paper on the following topic:Explain a biblical view of business ethics. Compare and contrast with your own worl
Case 7.1: March Madness
The NCAA basketball tournament is an exciting time for basketball fans, particularly for those who cheer for schools make deep runs into their bracket. It may not, however, be such an amusing time for employers as many workers stream games that occur during work hours directly to their workplace computers. In order to help viewers avoid getting caught by their supervisors, one streaming website even provides a "Boss Key" that turns the screen into a fake Excel spreadsheet when clicked. Employees could watch on their phones, but it would look more obvious. Some studies claim that billions of dollars in productivity could be lost during the first week of tournament games. Few companies do anything formal in terms of policy or technology to stop the problem, but it's clear that streaming video and personal uses of various forms of social media are becoming significant problems in the workplace short of having supervisors physically walking around and inspecting what their workers are doing, employers can take several direct steps to prevent such a work distraction if they want the behavior curbed. They can restrict access to known streaming sites, block streaming video, or use software that records every website visited (and then give out punishment after the fact). Alternatively, they can set up televisions in breakroom or provide games. Or, if they can use existing(or develop better) performance metrics to track employee productivity, they may not have to worry so much about how and when the work actually gets done, provided the quality of work (face to face interaction with a customer or client) doesn't get reduced.
Questions for Discussion
Assume you are a supervisor of a software development team and you suspected many of your employees were watching significant parts of games during normal working hours, how would you respond? Would walking around or using the technological tools violate employees’ privacy, rob them of their dignity, or communicate mistrust in damaging way?
How would you balance the need for productivity with respecting and trusting your employees?
