Employee Monitoring
If you want to monitor your employees and comply with employment law and other relevant legislation, you need to carry out an assessment and then formulate a policy that your employees are aware of.
You have to decide what priority to give you concerns in the business, whether it is theft, or excessive telephone usage, or health and safety breaches. Identify the risks, place a priority on it and keep a note of all this. This note will look at two areas our employment law clients have raised: internet use and e-mails.
In these two areas, common causes of concern include time wasted on personal internet use, unacceptable sites (pornography, gambling), illegal downloading, pirate software and viruses, personal e-mails, compliance with business practice and confidential data theft. Without having to undertake any monitoring, you can start by having an acceptable use policy for use of the internet. It is impractical and likely to upset your employees if you ban all personal use of the internet. A better idea is to limit the times employees can use the internet for personal use and to make very clear what sites are unacceptable and that downloads of music, video, games or other software or not allowed. It is recommended that any acceptable use policy is created in consultation with your employees. Whilst you are agreeing the policy, you can explain that the business needs to ensure it is complied with, so that you will be monitoring internet use. This can be done by software, which can also block access to certain sites. If the software keeps a record of which sites your employee visits and what they look at on those sites, that would probably constitute personal data for the purposes of the DPA. You should therefore try to record intermittently, ensure it is held in a secure place (i.e. who has access to it and why?), and set out in your policy how long it will be held for (eg. For three months). If you want to emulate best practice then the software should be set so it only records time spent on the internet. If would then be down to you to assess whether an individuals internet time seemed excessive and you needed to investigate further. At that stage, you could collect information about which sites they were visiting and why. Finally, your policy should set out how it will be enforced and what the penalties will be for breaching the policy. You need to ensure you apply the policy consistently - it is no use allowing your best salesperson to spend half the day on Facebook and then try to discipline the accounts clerk for doing the same thing.
Finally, some employers ask if they can but in spy software in any event, without a policy and without telling their employees. It is possible to monitor employees through sophisticated software without most employees being aware. There are a number of problems though. First, your IT department would know - they may tell someone. Second, there is software that can identify these spy devices so any computer literate employee could find out. However, the main problem from an employment solicitor's perspective is that you may not be able to use any evidence it does uncover in a Tribunal or court. If you want to go this route, then do so at your own peril.