The Ethical and Legal Concerns of Employee Monitoring

Introduction

New advances in technology have helped employers utilize new forms of employee monitoring. Eighty percent of larger corporation’s employers took part of a survey about monitoring their employees. Out of every four employers admitted to regularly monitoring their employees. They took part in reviewing their employee’s emails, voice mails, and phone conversations (Evans, 2007). However, in some instances when the employees found out about the monitoring they were left with the feeling that there has been a violation of their rights to privacy.

Employee monitoring could fall under the organizational structure of human resources. The human resources department of an organization has the responsibility of hiring new employees, delivering, and developing proper training to make sure that the employees are following the proper procedures within the company. At the supervisor level the supervisor have the responsibility to monitor the employee’s activities to make sure the employee is properly following the employee handbook that should be on the companies work site. Depending on the level of professionalism, the monitoring of said employees could be conducted in a professional manner. However if there is poor ethics training, supervisors could abuse this practice.

The act of monitoring employees through various actives while at work can open a company up the ethical and legal concerns as well as litigation. This paper will address the ethical concerns that employer have the prompt them to monitoring their employees, the employees concerns of right to privacy, the legal concerns of employee monitoring, and a solution that addresses these concerns, employee ethics training.

Ethical Concerns

Within any business,...

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...oring. H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship | Florida Business School. Retrieved April 29, 2011, from http://www.huizenga.nova.edu/jame/employeemonitoring.htm

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