Legally, there's not much workers can do to challenge an employer'sright to analyze their communications, as long as they are made viacompany property.(Image: Shutterstock)

Bosses are finding new ways to figure out what employees are upto and whether what they're up to is good for the company.

The Wall Street Journal recently examined a numberof ways corporations are scrutinizing their employees'interactions, using technology to analyze behavior that untilrecently would have been considered impossible to interpret.

They're deploying machines to make sense of the tone of aworker's voice in a meeting, the number of email communicationsworkers are having with each other and clients and how much timeemployees are spending in meetings.

Related: How to strike balance between cybersecurity andemployee privacy

Traditional employer surveillance tends to focus on binaryquestions: Is the employee at work? Is the employee working? Is theemployee following the rules?

In contrast, the new employee surveillance strategies areseeking answers to much deeper questions regarding effectiveleadership, workplace morale and employee productivity.

In some cases, the technology is deployed openly and as a partof training. Life Time, the health club chain, has new managers doproblem-solving exercises with coworkers that are analyzed by avoice recognition program, Ambit Analytics, that the employeesdownload on their phones. The program uses tone and other keyidentifiers, such as interruptions, to provide insights on who isdominating a conversation and whether there are likelycommunication problems in the group.

Other times, employees aren't aware their behavior is beinganalyzed. Employees of McKesson Corp weren't told that theircompany had hired a firm to analyze 130 million of their emailcommunications in order to gain insights into turnover rates.

Managers at Microsoft have been using the company's own softwareto analyze the frequency of communications between employees andclients, although the company insists managers cannot seeinformation related to an individual employee; only groups of fiveor more. The company has sold its software to other largeemployers, such as Macy's and Freddie Mac.

Macy's claims it used the software to see how often workers weresending emails when they were supposedly off-the-clock. The companysaid it did so out of concern for work-life balance. Freddie Macused the software to figure out whether workers were spending toomuch time in meetings.

Legally, there's not much workers can do to challenge anemployer's right to analyze their communications, as long as theyare made via company property, such as employer-issued phones,computers and email accounts. Of course, just because a company isallowed to do it doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea. Theremay only be so much snooping workers will put up with.