Sitting in your cubicle, you are busy sending mails to your friends or sending your resume to explore better career opportunities, or writing scraps on the social networking sites. You feel secure as no one saw you. But wait! if you think you managed to be fooling your boss, then you are in trouble. The technology has made it easier for your employer to keep a tab on everything you do, from sending mails to monitoring your calls.
Employers now-a-days are indulging into monitoring their employees’ actions. From inspecting their personal folders in their systems to monitoring every mail sent by them, employers are curtailing the privacy of their employees. This has raised a concern towards employee privacy which is being debated worldwide.
In countries like USA, employee privacy issues are discussed explicitly as invasion of one’s privacy is considered to be a major breach of trust. However, in countries like Kenya, data security is of paramount importance. When issues like increasing internet usage for personal work, employee thefts, emails and social networking from office and the like are growing, surveillance of employees becomes necessary, thereby hampering an employee’s privacy. While employers try hard to ensure their employees do a good job, the employees don’t want to be spied. This conflict of workplace monitoring has paved the path for many such other dilemmas.
What employers have to say?
Many studies and surveys have revealed how employees spend time on doing personal work while being in office. Realizing the misuse of internet and rise in issues like data security, employers consider it relevant to monitor their employees’ actions. Employers defend themselves by quoting a number of reasons for employee surveillance like improving productivity, selecting and retaining honest employees, evaluating employee performance, conforming to privacy obligations of the company, etc. Some of the valid reasons stated by employers include:
Productivity: Surveys reveal that employees spend 2-3 hours of their working hours in sending personal emails, visiting sports sites, trading stocks, sending off color jokes to peers, etc. The surveys also show that on an average, it is estimated that 30-40 percent of employees' internet usage is not work related, and result in loss of productivity.
Improper internet usage: The employers have some justifiable reasons for monitoring their employees’ internet usage like preventing cyber stalking by employees and preventing employees from downloading software illegally, etc. Moreover, downloading pirated music or movies onto a work computer can lead to a copyright-infringement suit. Similarly, viewing pornographic video clips or sending off-color emails can lead to sexual harassment claims.
Data Security: In an attempt to prevent confidential data from being passed on to rivals through internet and prevent employee disclosure of trade secrets, employers keep a tab on outgoing the mails of employees.
The employers can indulge into several types of monitoring like follows:
Performance tracking: Here, the employer can take screen shots to know what his employees are doing, how much time they dedicate to work, and how productive they actually are.
Computer searches: Computers provided by employer are personal but not private. So employees should not expect privacy in computers. Employers have full right to access information stored on them.
Monitoring calls: Employers can monitor calls of employees to ensure quality. Moreover, employees use official phone lines for personal calls. To keep a check on that, employers can monitor calls.
Monitoring mails: For preventing employees from indulging into offensive writings, spreading rumors and the like employers have a legitimate business interest to review e-mails.
Some Common Offences:
Some of the most prevalent instances of misuse are:
• Sending messages with an intention to harass/malign, or exchanging potentially offensive messages;
1 Online chatting and instant messaging;
2 Shopping and gambling online;
3 Surfing pornographic sites;
4 Unproductive downloads;
5 Disclosing customer-sensitive information; breach of confidentiality
6 Browsing social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, and many more.
Is it legal or illegal?
It is necessary for an organization to know what its employees are doing. It is especially important to know what they are using the company’s resources for. While there are plenty of software available in the markets to track what is happening on each of the networked computers, there is one question that needs to be answered before making use of it. Is monitoring an employee legal? The answer to this question lies in the legal aspects of monitoring. In some cases it is legal, while in other cases, using monitoring software to view what employees are doing on the job can be illegal. In Kenya, as yet, no legislation specifically addresses e-mail privacy and electronic monitoring activities. Moreover, it depends on the policy of the company which should clearly specify the apparent offences and the penalties for the same. Moreover the intentions behind monitoring employees should be right. Employee surveillance should be done to track reliability, use of time, and efficiency of employees.
Conclusion:
A line is to be drawn on what is considered private for an employee and what is private for the organization, that is, what are those matters that are considered a part of organizational information that an employee has to skip. When too much sneaking is done, employees lose faith in the employer resulting in lesser commitment towards the organization. Employees feel alienated and thus are motivated to leave the company. To ensure healthy practices at workplace, companies should establish clear policies on workplace privacy, and clearly define what privacy means to the organization based on culture, business needs, and operations. It should be communicated properly what will be monitored and what will not. And lastly, a balance should be maintained between surveillance and employee privacy.
No comments:
Post a Comment