3 Ways to Monitor Employees Legally and Ethically Using Employee Monitoring Software

Under the laws, employers have every right to keep an eye on their employee’s usage of company’s equipment—especially computers & mobile, to ensure that these tools are used only for official work, not for their personal use. It’s quite natural to be uptight about what actually the employees are accomplishing at workplace, using the office’s equipment, while they are being salaried to work for the welfare of the office. Beside productivity, the company’s notoriety may be at peril if they are involving in certain online doings that are unethical, illegal, or damaging to the company.

Monitoring the employees in the workplace is one of an ideal way to keep an eye on such risks. But there’s a fine line amid being fretful and ravaging employee’s privacy, and going across that line which can destroy the workplace’s atmosphere.

There are sundries of whys and wherefores that supports monitoring. Firstly, it greatly assist in protecting the company from any kind of harm or theft. Monitoring ensure that the workplace is harassment-free, assure compliance with certain rules & regulations and protect evidence lest of lawsuits. According to a research, more than two thirds of companies are regularly monitoring their employee’s computer activity in the workplace, and almost half of the employees have been terminated for e-mail and Internet infractions.

                    

One of the key reason which fuel the growth of monitoring employees is the ever increasing competitive market which compels the employers to enhance productivity for their company’s long-term. With the aim of increasing the productivity they constantly monitor employee’s PC activities in all probable way and try to use the information to take crucial decisions.

On the other side, employers must be informed of the possible snags of monitoring. They might generate a self-confidence problem and upset the employee’s performance if they feel a mistrustful Big Brother is hanging over them. Employers could negligently find out about people's spirituality, sexual orientation, medical problems, and political views establishing a prospective secrecy dilemmas or sometimes even opening the company up to favoritism prosecution.

Globally around 27 million employees are under surveillance, which is about 1 quarter of the online workplace across world. Surveillance has become a most important concern in the modern technological advance world. Employers should look at the difference between monitoring and surveillance, it isn't contentious or impertinent to monitor the computer activities of an employee in the workplace, in order to ensure the correct usage and secure the reputation as well as assets of the company.

However surveillance has a creepy factor and is defined as tracing the activities of an individual that can actually lead to push-back from employees. It’s better to focus on the employee’s surveillance in the workplace during working hours, only if having justifiable policy suspicions or legal damage and authenticated agreement of legal representative and top authorities.

Below are 3 tips for how to monitor the employees in an effective and fair approach—

1. Set written policies-

There should be some vital corporate policy outline, especially for company’s equipment and Internet usage, which should be known to all. They should be well informed about the restrictions during working hours. Considering the expectations of employees, the employers should delineate their menaces and security requirements. Make strict rules for tolerable usage of Internet as well as downloading.

Employers must maintain a transparency with the employees by letting them know about what will be the procedure of monitoring and in what way the credentials and data will be protected or demolished.

2. Inform the employees-

Have a session with the employees, telling them about the downsides of digital assets that can put the company in danger, and how monitoring can avert them. Informing them that you are keeping a constant eye in them can be a vital preventive outcome.

Promote employees to have their private exchanges in their personal computers or smartphones, but not in the workplace. Reassure employees that they aren’t been monitored because you don’t trust them, but because it is vital to maintain a docile workplace.

3. Use employee monitoring software-

There are plenty of reliable and efficient products and software available in the market, which can be implemented in all computers in the workplace to monitor the employee’s activities. Rather that manually doing the collection of confidential personal details and waste your precious time there, better use the latest technologies to make you alert at the time of potential problems, so that you can stop or take some preventive action at the same moment.

Blocking or filtering certain sites can also assist in creating a hostile environment in workplace and spiral into risky problems.