Surveillance in the workplace
The European Court of Human Rights’ ruling limiting the right of employers to monitor the online activities of employees during working hours corrects its earlier decision that it was “not unreasonable for an employer to verify that workers are completing their professional duties during working hours,”, requiring employers to warn employee that their correspondence and other communications are being monitored, as well as requiring “adequate safeguards against abuse” to stop employers from preventing their employees access to personal emails during work time.
Do we want work environments so subject to surveillance that there is no possibility for employees to access their as e-mail, instant messaging or the telephone for personal use? What kind of labor relations are we talking about, and what sense do they make in the modern workplace? Can management really submit workers to prison-like levels of surveillance, making the workplace a panopticon where people are monitored at all times?
Labor relations are human relations, and as such, they must be subject to proportionality. Submitting the entire workforce of a company to constant monitoring is hard to justify, and will create an unattractive working environment. How can a company believe it is going to attract or retain talent with a maximum security prison mentality? It is possible to create surveillance structures to monitor all electronic communications… but it is also possible to avoid detection: two-thirds of workers in the US technology industry use a VPN on their laptops or their mobile devices, an easy solution that protects our privacy.
The important aspect of the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling is that it does not give employers a carte blanche for permanent monitoring, which not only invades privacy, but implies a lack of trust. Does that mean no controls at all? No. Metrics can be established to detect abuse, but allow for other normal and perfectly acceptable things such as a short conversation with a friend, a call home, an email…
Trying to control productivity by putting the workforce under surveillance belongs to another time: workers must be trusted to carry out their tasks. If you think you have to put everyone under surveillance, then as a manager, you are clearly going wrong somewhere. When people feel they are being spied on, they will not feel comfortable in their work. The company of the future is not a concentration camp, nor is it run by the Stasi. It is, surely, something else.
(En español, aquí)
