GMAT Essays (AWA)

I'd appreciate any feedback you could give me.

ESSAY QUESTION:
"Companies should be prohibited from monitoring e-mail correspondence of their employees, since this policy destroys the atmosphere of trust and undermines employee morale."

From your perspective, how accurate is the above statement? Support your position with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

YOUR RESPONSE:
I agree that companies should be prohibited from monitoring their employees' email correspondence. Such a practice will only lead to suspicion, fear, paternalism, and deception.

Whenever someone invades another unwilling person's privacy, he erodes that person's trust. For example, consider how AOL was damaged through their public leak of private emails and other personal information. Customers who used to trust them with their sensitive information left in hordes. In fact, invading people's privacy can be so serious that the invader may never gain that person's trust back. In the same way, companies build relationships of trust with their employees when they allow them more freedom.

By monitoring email, the company communicates an attitude of paternalism. This practice also shifts responsibility from the worker to an unknown supervisor who will read their email. Instead of letting their employees own their jobs, they unconsciously shift their employees' responsibility to work hard to a supervisor who watches them. Healthy companies foster an atmosphere of freedom and trust. Google allows its employees to take a portion of their week and work on a product that interests them. This policy promotes a spirit of freedom, responsibility, and innovation that email monitoring could never do.

Those who monitor emails promote it as a way for companies to keep their employees on track at work. However, this practice actually promotes a culture of deception. Employees will always figure out ways to get around the system and waste even more time in the process. Proponents also argue that email monitoring causes employees to be more cautious in what they write. That argument is legitimate but can also be stifling in the hands of a controlling boss. Companies should rather hold their employees to high standards of conduct and force them to take responsibility for what they write.

Email monitoring should be prohibited since it invades people privacy and destroys the relationships of trust on which every healthy business depends.

Such a practice will only lead to suspicion, fear, paternalism, and deception

This could be better. First two are basic drives and last two are response. Not going well together.