Cyber-attacks are part of the digital landscape businesses have to navigate today. Running alongside this is the growing need to monitor employees to ensure they are not causing your business harm and creating costly damage, whether through loss of productivity or actions resulting in financial and legal liabilities, such as data theft and data breaches.
As employee monitoring evolves, the need for a specialized system is necessary, along with an ethical approach and a practical corporate policy that supports the end aim – to protect your business interests.
What Can Go Wrong With Employee Monitoring?
You need to carry out monitoring in a professional way to guard against:
- Creating a climate of internal distrust.
- Invading the privacy of individuals.
- Changing employee behavior in a negative way.
- Encouraging policies and behavior which backfire.
Monitoring Where The Customer Loses Out
Monitoring can ensure that employers are in the driving seat of productivity. However, holding the reigns too tightly can be counter-productive. Monitoring is useful if the results feed into practical company policies. For example, Federal Express, monitored agent calls and in a bid to cut costs tied up a 140 second maximum call time target with half of each agent’s performance review. The result? Increased stress for employees and customer dissatisfaction as agents rushed calls to meet time constraints.
Employee Monitoring Needs To Be Executed Professionally
Employee monitoring rarely sees employers losing out in court over privacy violations. However, changing legislation coupled with an increased need to monitor employees, means that companies need to adopt the right monitoring strategy in the right way; keeping in mind the purpose of employee monitoring which is to protect legitimate business interests.
Don’t Put Your Company At Risk of Legal Action
As far back as 2003 a case involving a police officer’s sexually explicit message to his partner being discovered on his work pager during an investigation by the city into pager data plan strategies, went all the way to the Supreme Court, albeit the city securing victory against the plaintiff.
Is There Privacy on a Workplace Computer?
Whilst building a case against a former employee, the bosses at Loving Care Agency, used a copy of the individual’s hard drive. On this they found emails of exchanges with the ex-employee’s lawyer within a personal email account. While the company argued there should be no expectation of privacy when it comes to workplace computers, the 2010 verdict found in favor of the employee.
Ethical Monitoring Avoids Pitfalls
“…Professionally monitoring employees helps support a transparent, clear and ethical work environment…”
Adopting a specialized monitoring system designed to monitor employees helps support a transparent, clear and ethical work environment..
Whilst searching on social media or other online sources about potential candidates for a job opening is considered commonplace these days, invading personal, private communication through social media is putting your business at risk and is a legally grey area. Legislators, as is often the case, fall behind the pace of technological advances and business practices.
Digital Endpoint™ created KnowIT, Cloud Based Employee Optimization Software to help companies monitor the digital behavior of their employees across Mobile Devices, Macs & PCs.