“Ours is not a glamorous business. We’re a boiler manufacturer in Southern California
… we bring in steel, cut it up, and weld it into vessels,” said President and CEO Jane
Terry. “As an employer, we try to be competitive by paying attention to employee
lifestyles … we have flex time … and we put great emphasis on employee family
values.”
Despite seemingly doing all the right things to attract and keep good employees,
Ajax Boiler encounters some of the negativity common to businesses everywhere.
For example, almost immediately after joining Ajax Boiler around the turn of the
millennium, Terry encountered an employee who made pointed and repeated “by
the book” comments about the potential for sexual harassment in the workplace in
general, and at Ajax Boiler in particular. It became apparent to Terry that it would be
wise to take a proactive stance in the face of such commentary, and that computer
activity monitoring software seemed to make sense as the cornerstone of such a
posture.