Employee Internet Monitoring Tips

Respecting Employees' Privacy

An employer's requirements for information should be balanced with an employee's right to privacy. For almost all personal information — including pay and benefit records, formal and informal employee files, video and / or audio recordings, and records of web-browsing, electronic mail, and keystrokes — the following basic rules should be used to help establish and maintain that balance:

• The employer should say what personal information it collects, why it collects it, and what it does with it.
• Collection, use, or disclosure of personal information should be done only with an employee's knowledge and consent.
• The employer should only collect personal information that's necessary for its stated purpose, and collect it by fair and lawful means.
• The employer should normally use or disclose personal information only for the purposes that it collected it for, and keep it only as long as it's needed for those purposes, unless it has the employee's consent to do something else with it, or is legally required to use or disclose it for other purposes.
• An employees personal information needs to be accurate, complete, and up-to-date.

Employees Who WaiveTheir Privacy Rights

Employers may be tempted to advise employees or potential employees that they have no expectations of privacy in the workplace — that the loss of privacy is a condition of employment. An employee who agrees to work under these conditions, it could be argued, has agreed to the unlimited collection, use, and disclosure of their personal information.

Whether this is really consent — clear, informed, voluntary consent — is questionable. And the main reasons for collecting only the personal information that's required for appropriate purposes gets lost with this approach. A more reasonable solution is to specifically ask employees to consent to explicit, limited, and justified collections, uses, and disclosures of their personal information.

Things To Consider When Monitoring Your Staff

Consider the issues below prior to implementing electronic monitoring of employees:

Management issues
Ensure that your reasons for policies and methods of monitoring are:

• well thought out to meet your business requirements
• justified and proportionate
• are consistent throughout your company and applied fairly

• inform staff, employee representatives or trade unions about policies and procedures
• introduce the policies to the staff, new and old
• include monitoring policies in your workers' contracts and inform them of these when they begin work
• restrict access to information collected through monitoring to only those that require it
• consider other ways of monitoring
• inform your staff of how you will deal with misconduct revealed through monitoring

• Set out workers' rights, responsibilities and limitations of use for the Internet and email at work, but don't be too restrictive.
• Allocate personal Internet usage time, such as outside normal working hours or during breaks and lunches.
• Detail and post monitoring methods for Internet and email usage.
• Educate staff on the potential legal risks and liabilities/security issues that misuse may create.
• Make clear to staff that you are within legal guidelines on the interception of Internet and email misuse.
• Try blocking access to sites rather than monitoring the sites someone visits.

What Can Your Employer Monitor On Your Computer?

The answer to this question is...anything! The technology that is available today can and will allow you to monitor just about anything that you can do on the computer, such as:

1. Internet usage
2. Software uploads / downloads
3. Documents and files stored on your computer
4. Any images that are displayed on your computer screen
5. How long your computer has been idle
6. How many keystrokes per hour/minute/second
7. Emails - outgoing and incoming

Statistics Gathered From Employee Monitoring

So you have a staff containing 50 to 100 people who work 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Everything seems to be running fairly smoothly, but how do you really know?

Employee Monitoring software is vital to meeting the needs of the business you are in. Human Resource Departments and Workforce Departments require the collection of employee data to ensure the staff have the training they need to do their jobs and to know where weaknesses exist. This data might also include missed time or activity that is breaking company policy.

Your business is the vehicle and your employees are the gasoline. Keep you employees clean and maintained and your business will be a smooth ride!

It's Not Just About The Employee

When employee monitoring is brought up in conversation in the workplace, employees automatically put themselves in the "Big Brother" situation. They feel that their privacy is being invaded, and that the level of trust the company has for them is non-existent, therefore creating trust issues for the employee. A company though has numerous reasons for monitoring employee activity that do not necessarily have to do with the employee. Here are a few examples:

1. Maintenance and Management of Computer and Network Systems
2. Application and Network Troubleshooting
3. Storage and Bandwidth Capacity Planning

As a company, using your own internal reasons to monitor employee Internet usage may help your case in monitoring employees in general. Bandwidth issues, and PC performance are examples of why you might need to monitor for business purposes. Be sure to include these and others when discussing the need to monitor employee Internet activity with your staff.

Internet Monitoring in the Workplace

Technology now makes it possible for employers to monitor workplace communications by any employee -- on the phone and in cyberspace. And many employers take advantage of these tracking devices: A survey completed by more than 700 companies by the Society for Human Resource Management found that almost three-quarters of the companies monitor their workers' use of the Internet and check employee email, and over half review employee phone calls. According to a study by the American Management Association, businesses offering financial services -- such as banks, brokerage houses, insurance firms, and real estate companies -- are most likely to monitor their workers' communications.

Employers have a justifiable interest in employee Internet monitoring and how employees spend their work hours. After all, no employer wants workers surfing X-rated websites, sending offensive email, or calling in bets on the ponies on the company's dime. And employers may want to take steps to ensure employees are not giving trade secrets to competitors, engaging in illegal conduct at work, or using company communications equipment to harass their coworkers.

Alternatives To Monitoring Employee Internet Use

Surveillance of employee Internet use is becoming a troubling topic to many these days. People will turn to the Internet with very personal issues which they would likely never discuss over the phone or by email because of the sensitivity to the issue - you can get to the Web anonymously. This is of course unless you employer is watching. Websites that employees have visited may indicate that they have a very serious illness or be in an abusive relationship.

It is possible for employers to enforce their Internet Usage Polices and still allow for their employees to maintain some level of privacy. If, for example, a company wants to keep its staff from visiting sex sites -- but will permit their surfing sports, business and new sites for a maximum of 15 minutes during breaks -- that company can use software to limit workers' activities to just those sites and time frame.

There are methods that exist today that will allow for employers to check to see if their employees are transferring emails back and forth from other outside of their work. Catching just the headers of emails, the To and From fields will identify this information.

Conflicting Rights - Employee vs Employer

Employers have legitimate reasons for collecting personal information about their employees. If they do not collect this information, they will have no way of knowing if the potential employee will meet the requirements of employment. They need to address performance issues and ensure the physical security of their workplace. And they may see electronic monitoring and other surveillance as necessary to ensure productivity, stop leaks of trade secrets, and prevent workplace harassment.

Sometimes employers have no choice but to delve into private matters. But they can keep those instances to a minimum, and limit the impact on personal privacy. The possibility that an individual employee might do something harmful doesn't justify treating all employees as suspects. The benefit of knowing what every employee is doing on company time and equipment, at all times, needs to be weighed against the cost. Preventing workplace harassment is an important goal, but it's best achieved through workforce training and sensitization, tough anti-harassment policies, and appropriate measures when harassment is reported or reasonably suspected.