The vice president of 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."
The Vice President of Climpson Industries recommended that electronic monitoring of internet be implemented on all the employees’ workstations to identify and punish those who use internet from their workstation for personal or recreational purposes. The Vice President comes to this conclusion because of the need to increase employee productivity thereby increasing profits and that monitoring internet usage will stop employees from wasting their time making them more productive. However, there are some assumptions made in giving this recommendation that might not hold true.
First of all, the Vice President assumes that employee productivity will increase directly by forcing them to spend more time on their work. It might be possible that continued work can lead to burnout rather than increased productivity and that taking breaks in the middle of work to spend some time on recreational activities are actually helping improve employee productivity. If this is the case, then implementing this recommendation would not result in any tangible benefits and might also result in additional losses.
Secondly, the second assumption made here is that punishing internet usage from workstations will discourage employees from wasting time altogether. It might be possible that the employees will continue to access internet from other sources such as their mobile phones and still end up spending wasting work hours on non work related activities. It might also be possible that making internet usage punishable would result in employees wasting their time in other ways, maybe by spending more time in the cafeteria or just sitting at their desk, staring at their workstation not doing any work. If this is true, it will render the reccomendation fallacious.
Thirdly, it is assumed in the recommendation, that in this method of monitoring there won’t be any false positives. It might be possible that a certain employee might be using the internet for legitimate purposes, perhaps shopping for gifts for the upcoming Christmas party in the office. It might also be possible that a certain employees’ workstation was used by somebody else to access internet without his/her knowledge. In these cases, this recommendation would end up punishing the wrong person or for the wrong reasons.
In conclusion, the argument as it stands now, is considerably flawed due to its reliance on several fallacies. Unless the Vice President conducts a thorough study to find out more information and counter the above points, it will not be possible to recommend proper course of action to improve the productivity of employees and improve the profits of the company.
Comments
e-rater score report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.5 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 3 2
No. of Sentences: 16 15
No. of Words: 419 350
No. of Characters: 2207 1500
No. of Different Words: 193 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.524 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.267 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.89 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 160 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 132 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 102 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 62 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.188 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.547 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.688 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.343 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.586 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.118 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
actually, also, first, however, if, may, second, secondly, so, still, then, third, thirdly, in addition, in conclusion, such as, first of all
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 17.0 19.6327345309 87% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 19.0 12.9520958084 147% => OK
Conjunction : 10.0 11.1786427146 89% => OK
Relative clauses : 13.0 13.6137724551 95% => OK
Pronoun: 42.0 28.8173652695 146% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 53.0 55.5748502994 95% => OK
Nominalization: 12.0 16.3942115768 73% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2260.0 2260.96107784 100% => OK
No of words: 417.0 441.139720559 95% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.41966426859 5.12650576532 106% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.5189133491 4.56307096286 99% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.97244503702 2.78398813304 107% => OK
Unique words: 199.0 204.123752495 97% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.47721822542 0.468620217663 102% => OK
syllable_count: 692.1 705.55239521 98% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.59920159681 106% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 10.0 4.96107784431 202% => Less pronouns wanted as sentence beginning.
Article: 5.0 8.76447105788 57% => OK
Subordination: 3.0 2.70958083832 111% => OK
Conjunction: 0.0 1.67365269461 0% => OK
Preposition: 2.0 4.22255489022 47% => More preposition wanted as sentence beginning.
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 16.0 19.7664670659 81% => Need more sentences. Double check the format of sentences, make sure there is a space between two sentences, or have enough periods. And also check the lengths of sentences, maybe they are too long.
Sentence length: 26.0 22.8473053892 114% => OK
Sentence length SD: 61.1286744806 57.8364921388 106% => OK
Chars per sentence: 141.25 119.503703932 118% => OK
Words per sentence: 26.0625 23.324526521 112% => OK
Discourse Markers: 8.8125 5.70786347227 154% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 9.0 8.20758483034 110% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 7.0 6.88822355289 102% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 0.0 4.67664670659 0% => More facts, knowledge or examples wanted.
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.285839099267 0.218282227539 131% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.102050532938 0.0743258471296 137% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0928359830414 0.0701772020484 132% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.181515458834 0.128457276422 141% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0949841004583 0.0628817314937 151% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 17.1 14.3799401198 119% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 36.63 48.3550499002 76% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 14.6 12.197005988 120% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 14.45 12.5979740519 115% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.37 8.32208582834 101% => OK
difficult_words: 91.0 98.500998004 92% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 15.0 12.3882235529 121% => OK
gunning_fog: 12.4 11.1389221557 111% => OK
text_standard: 15.0 11.9071856287 126% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 66.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.0 Out of 6
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.