Workplace monitoring is used to ensure safety and efficiency, but can conflict with employee privacy. Tools include cameras, audio monitors, and phone and computer usage monitoring. Laws are evolving to address the legality of different monitoring practices.
Workplace monitoring is a practice that involves keeping an eye on activities and conditions in a workplace for health, safety and business purposes. There are a number of tools that can be used for this task, and employers can use the information they collect in a variety of ways. This practice can create a conflict between a reasonable expectation of privacy and an employer’s need to run a business, and there have been several high-profile lawsuits challenging workplace monitoring practices as infringing on the privacy of employees. employees.
Monitoring tools can include cameras, audio monitors, and phone and computer usage monitoring, with logs or manually monitored by IT staff. Other practices may include random drug testing, periodic visits by supervisors to a floor, consulting records associated with equipment such as photocopiers, and the use of air quality monitors and other devices designed to check for environmental health risks.
Employers argue that workplace monitoring is necessary to keep workplaces safe, healthy and efficient. Keeping an eye on working conditions can enable people to spot problems such as theft, harassment and misconduct early, before they become a problem. For businesses that handle secure or confidential information, monitoring can be used to ensure that customer privacy is protected. Monitoring can also provide clear benefits for employee safety, as is the case with closed circuit television systems used in places such as banks.
Employees can defer monitoring, especially if it’s extensive or intrusive. In some workplaces it may be considered a necessary business term, while in others it may be considered an invasion of privacy. Lawsuits involving tracking that was done without employees’ knowledge or consent have sometimes been won on the grounds that the practice violated privacy.
Workplace monitoring law is evolving in response to changing technologies. While the law agrees that practices like walking on the floor as a supervisor to check for misconduct and problems are entirely appropriate and legal, there have been debates about things like reading private emails, recording phone conversations, and monitoring employees on the machine photographic. Monitoring without awareness is generally trickier legal ground because employees don’t have the ability to consent.
Some governments have passed laws that specifically address workplace monitoring and outline the legality of different monitoring practices. In other regions, much of the law relating to this practice is established through case law, following legal action.
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