Management > Do organizations have the right to monitor employees?

 

“Organizations have the right to monitor employees – both on and off the job.” Build an argument supporting this statement and an argument disagreeing with the statement.

 

Privacy is a controversial issue when it comes to the privacy of employees in organizations. I think that a company has the right to monitor employees’ activity on the job to a certain extent only, and has no right what so ever to monitor off the job activities.

In every case the management needs to notify employees whether their computer systems, emails, or phone calls they make are monitored. It’s of course not right if a worker instead of doing his/her job browses the internet or chats on the phone, but if nobody notifies them that this behavior is not right, they will just keep doing them until they fired. But even if emailing not permitted within a company, I don’t think anyone should have the authority to read them except for who they’re addressed to. Another question is that sometimes employees engage in dirty or pornographic jokes or other content. If that comes to the attention of management, I think they should ask the employee about it, and listen to what he/she has to say, instead of automatically firing them. Employees do have some kind of protection though that’s provided by the law. One of them is the Federal Electronic Communication Act (1986) that prohibits unauthorized interception of electronic communication. This law gives employees some privacy, but it doesn’t make electronic work place monitoring illegal. Employees are allowed to monitor communication for business reasons or when employees have been notified about this practice. Most employees might feel that it is wrong for a company to monitor their work electronically, but since the computer belongs to the company, it has the right to do so. Of course the enterprise has to protect itself and its intellectual properties, but I think there should certainly be a limit on it.

As to the private life of the employees, the employer should have no right at all to monitor or fire employees based on information gathered outside of the workplace. What someone does outside of the work place should be nobody’s business. No one has the right to make judgment or intervene under any circumstances. It should be illegal to monitor home computers, even though there is a reason to be suspicious. I think that if there is any reason the company should be suspicious that the employee is doing something illegal, it should get the police involved. There are also issues that are not so black and white, for example when one works with documents that have a highly sensitive content. Employers have a basic assumption that their workers can be bribed by someone who’s interested in certain documents, or other things. But again, I think they have to have the police involved in that case.

How much authority organizations have when it comes to monitoring employees’ communication and activity within the organization or the private life is an extremely sensitive issue. Organizations may feel that they are being ripped off, and of course they are right in many cases. When an employee spends more time online or on phone than doing the job, the company’s assumptions are justified. But this shouldn’t be the basic assumption. Only after notifying the employees about the procedures, it is all right to monitor their activities, but only at the work place, and not outside of it.

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