One category of employee communication that employers can’t monitor or interfere with is protected speech around potential union organizing efforts or discussions about terms and conditions of their employment. If your policy sounds arbitrary and intrusive, it could adversely affect employee morale, causing more damage than whatever you might turn up with your policing efforts. If such warnings aren’t part of your computer systems, these warnings may be published in the employee handbook or sent via email, or be part of an employee training session in which the employee acknowledges and accepts the monitoring policy.īefore warning employees, employers need to outline valid business reasons for monitoring communications. In fact, many computer systems require employees to acknowledge that monitoring may occur each time they sign in.Įmployers are on the strongest legal ground when they warn employees, in writing, that their emails are subject to monitoring. Most employees know that they can’t expect email messages on employer computers to be private. The legal standards for monitoring employee communications generally give employers the upper hand, particularly when company-owned computers are used. Activity reports can be customized to your specifications and sent to you automatically. Other solutions can be customized to block sensitive data from escaping, whether it’s transmitted via email or Web forms or saved on remote laptops. Monitoring software typically allows employers to designate words, phrases and websites that, when detected, identify potential problems and violations of company policies and procedures. Today’s software solutions can make it easy for you to monitor employees’ computer activity by generating reports of daily Internet activity and providing archives of the contents of draft emails that were never sent. Monitoring employee activity on your network isn’t limited to their communications and productivity, nor is it all retrospective. By flagging language in messages that’s associated with sexual harassment, bullying and hostile work environments, employers can identify and correct problematic behavior before legal claims are made. Monitoring systems may help catch emails or instant messages containing inappropriate messages. Employees may disseminate false, potentially incriminating or defamatory information about your company. To safeguard against reputational damage. However, inadvertent leakage, or a lack of awareness of the sensitivity of certain company information, can be addressed with specific content-flagging technology. An employee bent on corporate espionage isn’t likely to deliberately disseminate secrets in emails. Keeping proprietary company data from falling into the hands of competitors is a high priority. To detect leakage of intellectual property and other confidential information. If an employee is missing deadlines or underperforming, you might want to evaluate how much time he or she is spending browsing the Internet and social media sites. Why would an employer need to monitor employees’ communications at work? Valid reasons for such oversight include: Creating a policy to monitor such activities requires a delicate balancing act to protect your company and gain access to the information you need, without violating employees’ legal privacy protections. You may have legitimate reasons for monitoring some of your employees’ communications at work, particularly emails generated on company servers.
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