Many years ago I spied on employees (of my client). Specifically, there were always few sales guys who'd spend hours a day lost in games, dating sites, etc.
Who hasn't gotten lost on the internet? However, these guys were at it every day. From my perspective, they were caught in a trap that wasn't good for them or the company. I wanted was to help them find their way back to doing what they were good at.
I setup a squid proxy, got good at regex & category blocking.
After hitting my proxy, the sales guys would get a little frustrated but they invariably redirected themselves and that'd be the end of it. No need to involve management.
Non-stupid employers know that what employees need are duties they can care about & opportunities to make something better.
What employees don't need, to excel at their jobs, is to be surveilled, micromanaged or tightly restricted. (Granted, a few might hit a dark patch & need some guidance. A rare few might be beyond guiding and have to be let go.)
tl;dr: Don't be a crapty employer & you won't have an imaginary need to spy on your employees.
I worked at a small company and got sick of the monitoring/time-wasting complaints from managers. Installed a squid proxy and published the daily reports on an internal intranet page that everyone in the company could view. There was an explicit "internet is for work use only" policy, so there was no expectation of privacy, and I gave everyone in the company a lot of notice that it was happening. Our #1 user was very into Days-of-our-lives forum sites, and the sales guys still went to porn sites, but at least I wasn't the internet police any more.
I worked at a place once that had a similar policy. The head of IT had a background in mind-games. So, he had fun with it.
Blocked websites would get you a nastygram page, along with a warning that repeated attempts would result in an email to your manager.
If you tried to use one of those 'proxy' sites that would try to get around blockers, You got an extra-special-nastygram. Told you that an email was immediately sent to your boss, and his boss, and the Director of IT.
Well, I tripped -that- warning once, (trying to do a task at my manager's request,) so I let him know I couldn't and he was going to get an e-mail about it.
"What? I don't see one... Go talk to IT and tell them we need it."
I pondered this as I walked to the IT office. Thankfully I had a great rapport with them, so as they went to put in an exception I asked.
One guy installed Ultrasurf. First time I'd seen it. I didn't come up w/ a way to defeat it at the edge so I added a reg entry that redirected the output of the exe to NULL. It's a fairly obscure hack; I had been using it to offline malware.
Who hasn't gotten lost on the internet? However, these guys were at it every day. From my perspective, they were caught in a trap that wasn't good for them or the company. I wanted was to help them find their way back to doing what they were good at.
I setup a squid proxy, got good at regex & category blocking.
After hitting my proxy, the sales guys would get a little frustrated but they invariably redirected themselves and that'd be the end of it. No need to involve management.
Non-stupid employers know that what employees need are duties they can care about & opportunities to make something better.
What employees don't need, to excel at their jobs, is to be surveilled, micromanaged or tightly restricted. (Granted, a few might hit a dark patch & need some guidance. A rare few might be beyond guiding and have to be let go.)
tl;dr: Don't be a crapty employer & you won't have an imaginary need to spy on your employees.