Using employee monitoring, the employer can have better productivity for their organization. But what about employees’ privacy? Are you sure that while monitoring employees’ computer, you are endangering their personal space?
The answer to this question is yes. It’s possible for an employer to monitor employee computers. And that might also harm the privacy of workers. It depends on how employees are managing their personal and professional space separately. While as an employer, you also need to be careful to monitor employees without hurting their personal space. If you are ready, here we go.
Defining Workplace Privacy:
Indeed every person has a right to protect their privacy. But in the corporate world, there are some limitations to that. Nowadays, employers have every right to check the computer activities of their employees. On the other hand, employees have their break hours to manage their personal concerns. During those breaks, it would be unreasonable for the employer to sneak on employees’ activities.
It’s quite apparent that personal and professional space can be separated. As an employer, it’s your job how to define privacy in your workplace.
Transparency Is Essential:
Considering privacy as an issue, transparency is also essential in work culture. Though an employer has the right to monitor employee computer, an employee has a right to be informed about that. According to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in EU law has stringent data privacy requirements that every firm should follow. It clearly states that employees have the right to know that their computer activities are getting tracked by the employer. As an owner or manager of a company, it’s a duty of the employer to mention that in the company’s policy. And find whether your employees are okay with everything.
Defining Activities That Should Be Monitored:
With a powerful employee monitoring system, management has access to keep track of every activity in employees’ computers. However, the modern days, employee monitoring systems aren’t the big brother innovations of the past. Thanks to the advancement in technology, there are employee monitoring solutions available in the market, which collects only the selective data.
Example: Suppose an employee is working on an urgent project, you can be specific and monitor only the data related to that project.
Pseudonymization When Appropriate:
Productivity is the key to your business growth, while the biggest concern to productivity is data breaches. Obviously, by monitoring employees’ computers, you can find out about the events that can cause data loss in your organization. In such a case, you can track the employee’s information using the monitoring system, which can keep the data pseudonymized. That way, the data of the employee could be anonymous. Only in case of any emergency, you can decode it to access all information.
Ignore The Unrequired Data:
There might be a chance that your employee monitoring system can store non-professional details of employees. If that happens, the employer should just ignore that and delete such things that aren’t useful to the company.
For security measures, it is essential to collect every data, which could be important to the company. You might need to check on the mistakes for forensic reasons. However, you can delete such data after using it. That way, you can also clean up the storage data in your workspace system.
Manage Accountability:
The best way to keep your employees engaged is to reward them. If your employees are performing better, and you can monitor that. Then you should reward them for their great work. That way, you can also encourage other employees to enhance their productivity. The culture of reward and appreciation will also help you to improve the engagement in your organization.
Conclusion:
How to monitor employees’ computers without harming their privacy?
This is the question that might have come in your mind also. Yes! it’s possible to monitor employees’ computers while not hurting their personal space. It depends on how you and your employees manage things in a workspace.
