Researchers have used electronic performance monitoring (EPM) to examine the effects of social facilitation. This trend had previously been limited to face-to-face or group settings, but electronic performance monitoring establishes the impact of social facilitation in a virtual sense. EPM is the utilization of information technologies (e.g. computer networks) to track, evaluate, analyze, and report information regarding an employee's performance. Many businesses have adopted this method in which workers activity is automatically monitored throughout the workday. This topic is of substantial interest to those in the field of social psychology due to underlying mechanism at work; namely, the phenomenon of social facilitation.