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Autumn 2003 Newsletter

An eye on the workers

It makes sense to keep an eye on what your employees are doing. They may be abusing their position by pilfering, or simply wasting your time and money by doing things other than work - surfing the internet, making personal calls and so on. These days, there are all sorts of devices you can use to monitor what people are up to - with or without them knowing. What was once restricted to James Bond's Q can now be DIY.

The trouble is, there are rules, and breaking the rules may lead to problems when you try to do something with the results of the monitoring - for instance, sacking an employee who has been up to no good. If you have infringed the employee's rights, you will have to pay compensation, even though you think it should be the other way around.

The rules are in the Data Protection Act, and the Information Commissioner has published a Code of Practice that employers should follow (see www.dataprotection.gov.uk). Some of the important principles are giving clear guidelines to staff on what is and what is not acceptable behaviour - that's only reasonable - and making any monitoring "proportional" to what you are trying to achieve. For example, if you are concerned with how your telesales people deal with customers, you could reasonably monitor their calls - but it wouldn't be a reason to monitor all the calls made by all employees.

In general, monitoring should be done openly, so the employees know that it happens. It's better to make people think about what they do, and behave properly, than to catch them doing something wrong.