10 Things Your Boss Won't Tell You-I

1. "Yes, we are reading your emails and your IMs."

Like many financial services firms, Wedbush Securities monitors the daily emails, instant messages and social networking activity of its 1,000-plus employees, says Mattias Tornyi, the company's Director of IT. They use an email monitoring software to flag certain types of messages and keywords within messages, he says. Every day, they end up reading 5% to 10% of the messages employees send.

That's fairly extensive, but many firms are, at the very least, monitoring some of employees' Internet, phone and email use, especially larger companies and those in sensitive or heavily regulated industries. The market for email monitoring software has grown more than 25% each year since 2008 and is projected to reach $1.23 billion in 2013, according to IT market research firm Gartner; more than one in three large U.S. companies employ actual people to read or analyze employee email, according to a 2010 study by email monitoring firm Proofpoint. Plus, a survey by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute found that almost half of the small, medium and large companies surveyed monitored phone use, and two out of three monitored web use. Instant-message and text-message monitoring are also increasing, says Stephen Marsh, chief executive of email archiving firm Smarsh.

Not only do employers watch what you're doing, but many act on what they find. One in five large U.S. companies fired an employee for violating email policies in the past year, the Proofpoint survey found. What was a fireable offense? Most email investigations pertain to issues of employees leaking sensitive, confidential or embarrassing information, or theft not racy messages sent to a girlfriend from an office email account or the occasional online shopping binge from the corporate desktop.

2. "You're too old for this."

When Joyce Kalivas-Griffin, 57, saw a job opening at a private school nearby, she immediately sent in her resume. She was hopeful the description matched her skills almost perfectly but heard nothing. Then, she noticed that the job had been posted again, so she tweaked her resume to obscure her age and resubmitted it. This time, the school called her in for an interview. Kalivas-Griffin says she nailed it, but she didn't get the job: She believes that when the interviewer met her and realized she's no 30-something, her age tipped the scales against her.

Kalivas-Griffin will never know for sure, but as the workforce gets grayer, age bias is likely to increase, experts say. Roughly 25% of employers said they were reluctant to hire older workers, according to a 2006 survey by the Center on Aging and Work at Boston College, and after looking at only a resume, employers discriminated against women they perceived to be 50 or older, according to a 2007 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It's a trend, experts say, that's gotten worse in the recession, as evidenced by the latest data from the Labor Department: laid-off workers 55 and older spent an average of 35 weeks looking for work, compared with 30 weeks for 25 to 54 year-olds. "We know it's very prevalent," says Laurie McCann, a senior attorney with AARP Foundation Litigation. "The problem is that people often don't know it's happening, because of the nature of applying for jobs." In a world of online applications, you never see the other candidates, nor do you meet the hiring manager. That's why career consultants often recommend anyone older than 45 or 50 alter their resume to shift focus away from their age and toward their experience, achievements and skills. You don't need to list every job you've ever had; instead highlight achievements in a measurable way - like say, how much you increased revenue for your department - and be sure to list tech, social media and other skills.

3. "I know when you're faking the flu."

As a production manager at a high-end commercial photo lab, Stuart Horvath, 32, supervised both permanent and freelance production assistants. Their job was to process the film, but when someone "didn't feel like dealing with all the slides that day, the machine would 'suddenly' jam," Horvath says and he knew it didn't jam nearly as frequently as a few of his staff members claimed. Then there were the myriad sick days taken by one of his freelancers. Horvath suspected he was faking and confirmed it when he ran into the employee at a bar on a night when he'd claimed to be sick. Look, he says: "I've been a boss, but I've been an employee too."

It's true: The boss often knows if you're slacking off, job-hunting, sneaking out, faking sick or padding your expense report. In fact, a growing number of companies are hiring private investigators to track employees who call in sick with a suspicious illness, according to an article published last month in Bloomberg Businessweek. Perhaps it's a sign of tough times. More than one in four employers say they think more employees have been faking illness and taking the day off since the economic downturn began, a 2009 CareerBuilder.com survey revealed. They're not merely paranoid: About one-third of workers admit to calling in sick to work when they weren't. And that's not all your boss knows. "Sometimes the people on my team spend their days putting up a smokescreen to make it look like they are working hard, but I know they can't be," one employer at a financial services firm in Phoenix says. Another knew her employee was looking for another job. The lesson: Your antics are, for the moment, tolerated, but they probably haven't gone unnoticed.