2 January, 2020
In today’s time, a lot of workplace duties have changed with the intrusion of technological advancements. The most intriguing thing to note about modern businesses is, employees can virtually work from home or anywhere in the world while resting on their comfortable couch. Employees can easily contact the business with their social media profiles and personal email without any hesitation. This means they have access to a lot of business’s data. However, one major setback of the massive advancement in technology is that employees feel they have the ultimate freedom to do anything as they want in a workplace. However, the truth be told, this is far away from reality and doesn’t get contoured within the traditional norm of workplace security. The best part about being an employer is that one can hound or scrutinize an employee any time if he/she shows any suspicious behavior.
However, it is essential for you, as an employer, to know about a few laws related to workplace security:
1. Computer and Workstation Monitoring
Generally, most employers can easily monitor what their employees are doing on computers, smartphones and wireless devices. However, sometimes there is a need to go the extra mile to make sure that nothing goes wrong. Since a company own all assets within the premises, you, as an employer stand a perfect chance of requesting information from the employees that are concerned with work at any time. For example, you can view what has been saved on the desktop and what is stored in hard drives. You can also keep track of the time an employee’s computer remains idle. Furthermore, you can also install keystroke software to know what employees are talking about through their keyboard. However, this is too much for some people that is why you should make employees aware of all this when they join the company.
2. Monitoring of Telephone Devices
As an employer, you are allowed to hear when employees make work-related phone calls. In fact, employees who work in call centers have their calls recorded routinely. Their supervisors are responsible for hearing those phone calls and giving feedback at the end of the day. Call records are kept to ensure quality. It is crucial that you cannot monitor a phone call if it is private. You will be surprised to know, this holds true when a company issues smartphones to employees for professional use. However, there is a slight change in the law when employees start using their professional numbers for personal use. If your employees start using office issues number or smartphone for personal matters, it is essential to inform them on time.
3. GPS Tracking
If the company has issued a vehicle for an official visit, you as an employer stand a perfect chance of tracking the employee’s location. In today’s time, it is common for a lot of people to engage in unethical activities, which is why the company must know about the whereabouts of an employee during working hours. You can also keep track of how fast they are driving and how much they spend on fuel. However, every state has different laws regarding GPS tracking. In some countries, tracking somebody’s vehicle despite an official engagement is acknowledged as a criminal offence on a federal level. Although GPS tracking is a common phenomenon in today’s time, employees can easily keep in touch with their employers by sending live locations through WhatsApp messaging.
4. The Use of Social Media
Ever since the inception of social media, the dynamics of how everyone communicates have changed. Although social media is a major marketing tool for a business, it is essential to know how much time employees spend on it. For example, a company doesn’t want employees to publish bad news about them through social media. However, you also want employees to post pictures and videos related to the company through it. You will be surprised to know, there are a few countries that scrutinize companies if they hound employees for logging in to their accounts through company-issued devices. More than anything, the problem with social media is that it is addictive. An average person spends more than 5 hours on social media every day. This means a lot of people engage in interacting with people who are located far away from them as compared to those who are close enough.
5. Taking a Lie Detector Test
Although these tools can be used as a very important source in the world of law, you cannot conduct a lie detector test at the workplace as an employer. Furthermore, if the employee suffers an emotional loss as a result of being hounded in the company, he/she could even sure you on account of personal injury damage. Therefore it is essential to draw a fine line between being an employer and affecting somebody’s self-esteem with something as lethal as a lie detector test. You will be surprised to know, employees are fully protected under the Employee Polygraph Protection Act. This act ensures that employees don’t have to undergo a lie detector test in a company at any point in time.
6. E-Mail Monitoring
Email is the main source through which employees contact employers all the time. Since you’re providing employees with office email addresses, you can go through their emails at any time. You can also question an employee if there is anything suspicious in emails. This holds true for even personal emails such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and Instant Messages. Although, you can inspect personal accounts with the devices you’ve issued to your employees. However, you can surely not monitor personal activity when they are accessing their data with personalized smartphones. Intriguingly, you can monitor the emails that are tagged as “private”. Secondly, it is crucial to beware of phishing scams online as they can cause massive damage to the company. As an employer, you must train your employees about email fraud to ensure they don’t get in trouble on account of a prospective fraud.
7. Video Monitoring
It is better to have multiple breaks during working hours to make sure employees remain active and motivated throughout work. By law, you can incorporate video cameras to keep an eye on the company property. However, it is better not to let employees know exactly where they’ve been installed. You can install them plain slight or covertly. Many companies often install video cameras to measure employee productivity and performance at work. This way you can notify the employees if they’re engaging in gossips with peers throughout the day. As discussed, you are not bound by law to legally inform your employees when they are being recorded on camera. Video monitoring is imperative in today’s time because of the increase in the number of office theft cases.
8. The Usage and Storage of Passwords
No matter how many security measures you take to protect the sensitive company data, it is essential to set strong passwords to protect computer devices and different types of equipment. Even if you take all important measures to protect data, there is no need to trust important information with a senior manager. Passwords should always be set to protect a device as much as possible. However, you cannot ask personal email accounts and passwords from employees at any time. As an employer, you should make sure that the private life of every employee is as protected as it should be. If you don’t take charge of this, people working in the organization won't feel valued. Most employers make the silly mistake of firing employees on minor issues. This compels employees to hire attorneys for suing the company if the reason is unfair. For instance, if your company is situated in California, you could be sued by a Los Angeles Employment Attorney anytime.
9. After Hours Business Activities
Keep in mind, in such instances, you have no control over what your employees are doing. Every employee is protected by the “Lifestyle Discrimination Laws”, which don’t allow a company to hound an employee when he/she is navigating social life after work hours. Secondly, when companies start to bother employees after business hours, they feel less valued and having overworked diminishes their performance during business hours. However, one thing that you can control is how they navigate their social relationships and present themselves at a company event. For instance, you can tell them about the dos and don'ts of a professional meeting abroad. The best way to inform them about such laws is to issue every new employee, a handbook that enlists everything for everyone working in the company to know about. Explicitly state that they aren’t allowed to conduct personal meetings within the premises of the company building.
10. Delivering of Postal Mail
When it comes to postal mail, employees should not consider any privacy whatsoever. You can open their mail if it has been sent to the premises of the office building. Although, federal law doesn’t allow tampering with the post email state laws isn’t in coherence with that. Once the mail is dropped at the doorstep of the office, you can open it anytime without worrying about the repercussions.
However, it is better to leave the mail as a gesture of goodwill, in case you realize that there’s something very personal packed in it.
You will be surprised to know that federal law allows the mail to be opened by anyone in charge of the company as soon as it arrives at the doorstep. In some instances, the company stands an absolute chance to keep the mail as well.
