Ethics Must Come First While Doing Employee Monitoring!!

Technology is a bridge that connects a business to the global market. Fast growing use of emerging technologies has created a threat to human privacy. Today organizations have no other choice than being dependent on technical solutions for saving its security. Now it has become very hard to make a proper balance between human privacy and organizational security. Managers want to keep a detailed information about its investment in resources and staff so productivity fetched could be calculated correctly hence, employee monitoring has become must now. Automation has been introduced in order to help to raise productivity stats of any organization not to hurt employee personal life flexibility. And, here integrity must be followed strictly.

”Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will.” –John D. MacDonald

The managers should be a bit conscious of doing monitoring as it might attach a dilemma of keeping eyes on employee’s shoulders for some issues like their religions, personal life activities, any medical problem etc. This inadvertent doing impacts employees mind adversely and make them feel insecure, which is obviously not ethical.

“Managers should consider the difference between monitoring and surveillance.”- Andrew Walls, security and risk analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc.

Keeping tabs on all the organizational property to avoid the organization to come into any financial loss is not controversial but a keeping persistent monitoring eyes on each employee whether they are busy doing their personal activities is not ethical and naturally unacceptable.

There are three main points which must be kept in mind while doing employee monitoring:

Maintain a written policy

It is the responsibility of management to maintain a corporate policy that should be present online and shared with all the employees working in the organization so they could better know their responsibilities and the limitation of device usage. It helps organization greatly in case of any legal matter. Managers should elaborate employees the importance of security and company threats, and how monitoring can help resolving such critical issue. Be very transparent with your staff for all the tools you are using to track them for saving organization to get into any kind of loss.

Tell everything to your employees

Before keeping a track on employees it is the responsibility of upper staff to let everyone know the privacy limit at the workplace, punishment for the wrong use of digital assets and violation of any corporate rule. Only telling your staff that you will track them will not impact them strongly rather you need to mention them the reasons behind tracking and how it saves business and everyone. Tell them very clearly, ‘we are not tracking to know which movie you are interested in rather we do so just to know if organizational assets are being used for productive activities or not. We are simply emphasizing on the fact that you should use your home computers or smartphones for personal purpose’.

Take help of technology

Though there are many products available in the market for monitoring computers, mobiles, and other devices. But, what is more, important to you? Once you start tracking, you will find plenty of data but to monitor only what is important to you and filter the rest, using technology is a great tool. Technology helps you to focus on what is important to you.

Hence, employee monitoring should always be done in an ethical manner having the only intention of organizational security not hurting someone’s personal life.