How Can You Conduct Employee Monitoring Without Becoming The Big Brother?

Employee surveillance isn’t a new thing. It’s been used for years, and it’s becoming more and more popular, especially in large companies where it made keeping track of everyone’s work so much easier. It’s a great tool, but also a double-edged sword, as you might have difficulty implementing such a novity into your work space. Employers have the right to know if employees are doing the job they’re paid for, but The Big Brother atmosphere can create distrust and a sense of paranoia about workers’ private life exposure.

As an employer, you want to know what your team is doing during work time. That’s normal, and there are legitimate reasons for it:

• Performance evaluation — having an insight into their work timeline shows what type of tasks they excel at, and what can be improved
• Decrease distraction — Knowing their activity is monitored will probably affect how they spend their time in office
• Protect data — Hackers are famous for inducing business chaos, so it’s important to block certain websites, applications or hardware that are a potential threat to your business data

Employee monitoring should be a part of every business strategy, as it helps maintain quality performance and save sensitive data. Sometimes though, employers go lengths to monitor workers’ activity, and it raises an inevitable question — Can it go too far?

Question of legality

Technology evolves at light speed, but jurisdiction development in this field is slacking more than an average about-to-be-fired employee. There aren’t many laws concerning workplace monitoring, and even those differ from state to state, and from country to country.

For example, most companies within the EU use General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires the employee’s consent for monitoring. However, an employer can proceed with screening without one if there are “legitimate” reasons for tracking. Finland’s law concerning office data collection is the most rigorous, as employee’s personal data is protected with Act on the Protection of Privacy in Working Life and Data Protection Act.

Most of the countries’ regulation concerning employee’s data screening is based just on their consent requirement, but in reality, that consent is never fully objective, cause most of the time it’s influenced by their fear of being fired.

Question of morality

If something is legal that doesn’t automatically mean it’s right. There are a few important questions you should ask yourself before choosing to monitor your employees — What kind of information you want to collect and how do you plan on using it?

Monitoring can be pretty invasive — especially keystroke tracker and random screenshots taken. It can collect sensitive data that is by no means employer’s business — such as passwords.

Exposure of every single action taken creates stress in the office, and can be a real morale killer, as it gives employees an impression you don’t trust them. It’s not uncommon for companies to lose their most productive staff to mistrust issues. You mustn’t forget that ends don’t justify the means, and you should be careful not to go too far into personal space invasion in order to improve work quality.

What is the right approach?

As an employer, you want the transition into software monitored office to be well accepted and there are few general rules that you should follow:

Create a policy — To start, it would be best to establish a detailed policy about how will monitoring be implemented, and with a consent form that employees need to sign if they agree with your screening methods. Explain your rules and why they are in place

Be transparent — Mutual trust is the key to a good functioning company, and in order to achieve that, it’s important that you’re honest and transparent about tracking employee computer activity

Limit what is being monitored — Employee’s private correspondence is none of your business. You shouldn’t be snooping around what they write and who they write to, as that’s their free choice — but it should be done during break time. You should warn your coworkers of the amount of their social media activity during their work time

Restrict access to certain websites or applications — One of the ways you can prevent sensitive data from being used is by limiting access to potential threat sources. You can also restrict access to websites or apps you believe are the main reason your employees’ performance is dropping

In conclusion

Enforcing a PC usage tracking software can be both a productivity enhancer and a killer, and that’s a line you can easily cross if you aren’t transparent with your workers about why and what you’re monitoring.