Employee monitoring

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Employee monitoring is the (often automated) surveillance of workers' activity. Organizations engage in employee monitoring for different reasons such as to track performance, to avoid legal liability, to protect trade secrets, and to address other security concerns. [1] This practice may impact employee satisfaction due to its impact on the employee's privacy. Among organizations, the extent and methods of employee monitoring differ. [2]

Contents

Surveillance Methods

A company can use its everyday electronic devices to monitor its employees almost continuously. Common methods include software monitoring, telephone tapping, video surveillance, email monitoring, and location monitoring.

Software monitoring. Companies often use employee monitoring software to track what their employees are doing on their computers. Tracking data may include typing speed, mistakes, applications used, and what specific keys are pressed.

Telephone tapping can be used to record employees' phone call details and conversations. These can be recorded during monitoring. The number of calls, the duration of each call, and the idle time between calls, can all go into a log for analysis by the company. [2]

Video surveillance can provide video feed of employee activities that are passed through to a central location where they are monitored by another person. These can be recorded and stored for future reference which some believe is the most accurate way to monitor employees. "This is a benefit because it provides an unbiased method of performance evaluation and prevents the interference of a manager's feelings in an employee's review" (Mishra and Crampton, 1998). Management can review an employee's performance by checking the surveillance to detect and potentially prevent problems". [2]

Email monitoring gives employers the ability to look at email messages sent or received by their employees. Emails can be viewed and recovered even if they had been previously deleted. In the United States, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act provides some privacy protections regarding monitoring of employees' email messages and other electronic communications. See Electronic Communications Privacy Act#Employee privacy.

Location monitoring can be used for employees that move their place of work. Common examples of companies that use location monitoring are delivery and transportation industries. Sometimes the employee monitoring is incidental as the location is tracked for other purposes.[ vague ] Employees' phone calls can be recorded during monitoring. The number of calls, the duration of each call, and the idle time between calls, can all go into an automatic log for analysis by the company. [3]

Key logging, or keystroke logging, is a process that records a user's typing. [4] Key logging software may also capture screenshots when triggered by predefined keywords. Some[ who? ] see it as violating workplace privacy and it is notorious for being used with malicious intent. Loggers can collect and store passwords, bank account information, private messages, credit card numbers, PIN numbers, and usernames.

Legality

Employee monitoring often is in conflict with employees' privacy. [5] Monitoring collects work-related activities, but it can also collect employee's personal information that is not linked to their work. Monitoring in the workplace may put employers and employees at odds because both sides are trying to protect personal interests. Employees want to maintain their privacy while employers want to ensure company resources aren't misused. In any case, companies can maintain ethical monitoring policies by avoiding indiscriminate monitoring of employees' activities. [6] The employee needs to understand what is expected of them while the employer needs to establish that rule.

With employee monitoring, there are many guidelines that one must follow and put in place to protect the company and the individual. Some following cases are ones that have shaped the certain rules and regulations that are in effect today. For instance, in Canada, it is illegal to perform invasive monitoring, such as reading an employee's emails, unless it can be shown that it is a necessary precaution and there are no other alternatives. [7] In Maryland, everyone in the conversation must give consent before the conversation can be recorded (especially during telephone calls). The state of California requires that the monitored conversations have a beep at certain intervals or there must be a message informing the caller that the conversations may be recorded. However, this does not inform the company representative which calls are being recorded. All employers must create a comprehensive employee handbook that will include both mandatory and recommended policies. Handbooks must explain in detail what employees are permitted or not allowed to do in the workplace. Employers must update handbooks if employment laws or policies change. Other states, including Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Jersey have laws relating to when a conversation can be recorded. "Lawyers generally advise that one way for businesses to avoid liability for monitoring employees’ online activities is to take all necessary steps to eliminate any reasonable expectation of privacy that employees may have concerning their use of company email and other communications systems." [8] Businesses makes employee monitoring a known tool that supervisors use to avoid any potential legal issues that may arise. They will announce this during new hire orientation, in a staff meeting, or even in a workplace contract that employees sign either at the time of hire or after a form of misconduct.

On May 7, 2022, employers in the state of New York will be required to provide prior notice for the monitoring of employee internet, telephone or email usage. The new law is an amendment to the New York civil rights law and applies to any private individual or entity with a place of business in the state of New York. [9]

Businesses use employee monitoring for various reasons. The follow is a list that includes, but is not limited to:[ citation needed ] [10]

In January 2016, European Court of Human Rights issued a landmark ruling in the case of Bărbulescu v Romania (61496/08) regarding monitoring of employees’ computers. The employee Mr. Bărbulescu accused the employer of violating his rights to ‘private life’ and ‘correspondence’ set in the Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. [11] It held that a sales engineer had a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' against personal messages being read (including those to his fiance and his brother), even though he was told not to use a workplace Yahoo messenger for personal reasons, because "an employer’s instructions cannot reduce private social life in the workplace to zero. Respect for private life and for the privacy of correspondence continues to exist, even if these may be restricted in so far as necessary". [12] It follows that there is a human right to private communication, regardless of what an employer says.

A year later, in July 2017, German court ruled that computer monitoring of employees is reasonable but the use of keylogging software is excessive. [13]

Employee monitoring software developers warn that in each case it is still recommended to advise a legal representative and the employees should give a written agreement with such monitoring [14] Majority of instances are a case by case situation and is hard to treat all the issues and problems as one. As new laws have been enacted dictating the bounds of these practices, employers have been forced to change their monitoring protocols. [15]

Financial costs of monitoring

According to the American Management Association, almost half (48%) of the American companies surveyed use video monitoring to counter theft, violence, and sabotage. Only 7% use video surveillance to track employees' on-the-job performance. Most employers notify employees of anti-theft video surveillance (78%) and performance-related video monitoring (89%) (retrieved from the article The Latest on Workplace Monitoring and Surveillance). [16] In an article in Labour Economics , it has been argued that forbidding employers to track employees' on-the-job performance can make economic sense according to efficiency wage theory, while surveillance to prevent illegal activities should be allowed. [17]

An indirect way that companies can be affected financially through employee monitoring is that they can be sure they are billing clients correctly. According to "Business 2 Community," inaccurately billing clients is always possible because of human error. Such inaccuracies can cause disputes between a company and a client which could eventually lead to the client terminating its business with the company. This sort of termination will not only hurt the company's revenue stream but also its reputation with other clients or potential clients. The suggested solution to this problem is a time tracking software to monitor the number of hours a client spends with an employee. [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Surveillance</span> Monitoring something for the purposes of influencing, protecting, or suppressing it

Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information like Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.

Computer and network surveillance is the monitoring of computer activity and data stored locally on a computer or data being transferred over computer networks such as the Internet. This monitoring is often carried out covertly and may be completed by governments, corporations, criminal organizations, or individuals. It may or may not be legal and may or may not require authorization from a court or other independent government agencies. Computer and network surveillance programs are widespread today and almost all Internet traffic can be monitored.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mass surveillance</span> Intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population

Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, but it may also be carried out by corporations. Depending on each nation's laws and judicial systems, the legality of and the permission required to engage in mass surveillance varies. It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes. It is often distinguished from targeted surveillance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic Communications Privacy Act</span> 1986 United States federal law

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) was enacted by the United States Congress to extend restrictions on government wire taps of telephone calls to include transmissions of electronic data by computer, added new provisions prohibiting access to stored electronic communications, i.e., the Stored Communications Act, and added so-called pen trap provisions that permit the tracing of telephone communications . ECPA was an amendment to Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which was primarily designed to prevent unauthorized government access to private electronic communications. The ECPA has been amended by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994, the USA PATRIOT Act (2001), the USA PATRIOT reauthorization acts (2006), and the FISA Amendments Act (2008)

Time-tracking software includes programs and applications that allows its users to record time spent on tasks or projects. Multiple industries utilize this type of software, including those that employ freelancers and hourly workers. These include lawyers, freelancers and accountants.

Email privacy is a broad topic dealing with issues of unauthorized access to, and inspection of, electronic mail, or unauthorized tracking when a user reads an email. This unauthorized access can happen while an email is in transit, as well as when it is stored on email servers or on a user's computer, or when the user reads the message. In countries with a constitutional guarantee of the secrecy of correspondence, whether email can be equated with letters—therefore having legal protection from all forms of eavesdropping—is disputed because of the very nature of email.

A GPS tracking unit, geotracking unit, satellite tracking unit, or simply tracker is a navigation device normally on a vehicle, asset, person or animal that uses satellite navigation to determine its movement and determine its WGS84 UTM geographic position (geotracking) to determine its location. Satellite tracking devices may send special satellite signals that are processed by a receiver.

Employee monitoring software is a means of employee monitoring, and allows company administrators to monitor and supervise all their employee computers from a central location. It is normally deployed over a business network and allows for easy centralized log viewing via one central networked PC. Sometimes, companies opt to monitor their employees using remote desktop software instead.

A workplace is a location where someone works, for their employer or themselves, a place of employment. Such a place can range from a home office to a large office building or factory. For industrialized societies, the workplace is one of the most important social spaces other than the home, constituting "a central concept for several entities: the worker and [their] family, the employing organization, the customers of the organization, and the society as a whole". The development of new communication technologies has led to the development of the virtual workplace and remote work.

Workplace privacy is related with various ways of accessing, controlling, and monitoring employees' information in a working environment. Employees typically must relinquish some of their privacy while in the workplace, but how much they must do can be a contentious issue. The debate rages on as to whether it is moral, ethical and legal for employers to monitor the actions of their employees. Employers believe that monitoring is necessary both to discourage illicit activity and to limit liability. With this problem of monitoring employees, many are experiencing a negative effect on emotional and physical stress including fatigue, lowered employee morale and lack of motivation within the workplace. Employers might choose to monitor employee activities using surveillance cameras, or may wish to record employees activities while using company-owned computers or telephones. Courts are finding that disputes between workplace privacy and freedom are being complicated with the advancement of technology as traditional rules that govern areas of privacy law are debatable and becoming less important.

Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors’ activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers. Web tracking can be part of visitor management.

Computer surveillance in the workplace is the use of computers to monitor activity in a workplace. Computer monitoring is a method of collecting performance data which employers obtain through digitalised employee monitoring. Computer surveillance may nowadays be used alongside traditional security applications, such as closed-circuit television.

Phone surveillance is the act of performing surveillance on phone conversations, location tracking, and data monitoring of a phone. Before the era of mobile phones, these used to refer to the tapping of phone lines via a method called wiretapping. Wiretapping has now been replaced by software that monitors the cell phones of users.

Organizational technoethics (OT) is a branch stemming from technoethics. Advances in technology and their ability to transmit vast amounts of information in a short amount of time have changed the way information is being shared amongst co-workers and managers throughout organizations across the globe. Starting in the 1980s with information and communications technologies (ICTs), organizations have seen an increase in the amount of technology that they rely on to communicate within and outside of the workplace. However, these implementations of technology in the workplace create various ethical concerns and in turn a need for further analysis of technology in organizations. As a result of this growing trend, a subsection of technoethics known as organizational technoethics has emerged to address these issues.

Retina-X Studios is a software manufacturer company that develops computer and cell phone monitoring applications, focused on computers, smartphones, tablets and networks. The company is founded in 1997 and it is based in Jacksonville, Florida, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cellphone surveillance</span> Interception of mobile phone activity

Cellphone surveillance may involve tracking, bugging, monitoring, eavesdropping, and recording conversations and text messages on mobile phones. It also encompasses the monitoring of people's movements, which can be tracked using mobile phone signals when phones are turned on.

In the field of information security, user activity monitoring (UAM) or user activity analysis (UAA) is the monitoring and recording of user actions. UAM captures user actions, including the use of applications, windows opened, system commands executed, checkboxes clicked, text entered/edited, URLs visited and nearly every other on-screen event to protect data by ensuring that employees and contractors are staying within their assigned tasks, and posing no risk to the organization.

Corporate surveillance describes the practice of businesses monitoring and extracting information from their users, clients, or staff. This information may consist of online browsing history, email correspondence, phone calls, location data, and other private details. Acts of corporate surveillance frequently look to boost results, detect potential security problems, or adjust advertising strategies. These practices have been criticized for violating ethical standards and invading personal privacy. Critics and privacy activists have called for businesses to incorporate rules and transparency surrounding their monitoring methods to ensure they are not misusing their position of authority or breaching regulatory standards.

Indiscriminate monitoring is the mass monitoring of individuals or groups without the careful judgement of wrong-doing. This form of monitoring could be done by government agencies, employers, and retailers. Indiscriminate monitoring uses tools such as email monitoring, telephone tapping, geo-locations, health monitoring to monitor private lives. Organizations that conduct indiscriminate monitoring may also use surveillance technologies to collect large amounts of data that could violate privacy laws or regulations. These practices could impact individuals emotionally, mentally, and globally. The government has also issued various protections to protect against indiscriminate monitoring.

Bărbulescu v. Romania is a European labour law case, concerning employee monitoring and holding that workers have a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy.

References

  1. ↑ Martin, Kirsten, and R. Edward Freeman. "Some problems with employee monitoring". Journal of Business Ethics.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. 1 2 3 Mishra, Jitendra M; Crampton, Suzanne (1998). "Employee monitoring: Privacy in the workplace?". S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal. 63 (3): 4–14. ProQuest   231233456.
  3. ↑ SHERMAN, MARK. "GOV'T OBTAINS WIDE AP PHONE RECORDS IN PROBE". Archived from the original on May 14, 2013. Retrieved May 13, 2013.
  4. ↑ Leijten, Mariëlle; Van Waes, Luuk (July 2013). "Keystroke Logging in Writing Research: Using Inputlog to Analyze and Visualize Writing Processes". Written Communication. 30 (3): 358–392. doi:10.1177/0741088313491692. S2CID   145446935.
  5. ↑ Mishra, J. M. & Crampton, S. M. (1998). "Employee monitoring: Privacy in the workplace?". S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal. 63 (3): 4.
  6. ↑ Burks, F. Ethical Issues & Employer Monitoring Internet Usage. Chron.com, 2010.
  7. ↑ "Supreme Court rules employees have right to privacy on work computers".
  8. ↑ Yerby, Johnathan (2013). "Legal and ethical issues of employee monitoring". Online Journal of Applied Knowledge Management. 1 (2): 44–55.
  9. ↑ Francis, Simone R.D. (2021-12-29). "Electronic Monitoring of Employees in New York: New Restrictions and Requirements Will Take Effect in 2022". The National Law Review . Retrieved 2021-12-30.
  10. ↑ Mishra, Jitendra M. "Employee monitoring: Privacy in the workplace?". S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal. 63.
  11. ↑ "CASE OF BĂRBULESCU v. ROMANIA (Application no. 61496/08)". European Court of Human Rights. 2016-12-01.
  12. ↑ [2017] ECHR 754, [80]
  13. ↑ Catalin Cimpanu (2017-05-08). "Companies Can't Use Keyloggers to Spy on Employees, Says German Court".
  14. ↑ "How Companies Monitor Their Employees". 2016-09-23.
  15. ↑ Yerby, Johnathan. "Legal and ethical issues of employee monitoring". Online Journal of Applied Knowledge Management.
  16. ↑ "Training Solutions for Individuals, Organizations and Government Agencies".[ permanent dead link ]
  17. ↑ Schmitz, Patrick W. (2005). "Workplace surveillance, privacy protection, and efficiency wages" (PDF). Labour Economics. 12 (6): 727–738. doi:10.1016/j.labeco.2004.06.001. hdl: 10419/22931 .
  18. ↑ Vessella, Victoria (October 12, 2015). "6 Benefits of Employee Monitoring". Business 2 Community. Retrieved March 3, 2020.
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