Legal Status of Employee Monitoring

Legal status of employee monitoring

In today's technological advances, privacy has become a very prominent problem, especially in the workplace. The advent of new technology challenges privacy in ways that we could never before imagine. (Hartman, L., DesJardin, J. 2011, p263)

Employers always want to be sure their employees are doing a good job. By contrast employees don't want all their actions overseen. Employers need to manage their workplaces to place workers in appropriate positions to ensure compliance with affirmative action requirements or to administer workplace benefits. Monitoring also allows the manager to ensure effective, productive performance by preventing the loss of product to inappropriate technology use. (Hartman, L., DesJardin, J. 2011, p270)

New technologies now make it possible for employers to keep track of virtually all workplace communications by any employee, on the traditional phone and in cyberspace as follows: E-mail messages, Voice-mail messages, and Internet use. (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, paragraph.1)

Employers are allowed to monitor their employees' communications, within reasonable limits. However, employers must make sure that their monitoring action does not violate employees' privacy rights. And in fact, employers must determine how much and when monitoring is necessary to satisfy their interests without making employees feel unduly strict. Generally, the law permits the employer to monitor an employee's communications in the workplace, with a few legal implications. The following will analyze the legal status of employee monitoring.

Telephone Calls

Monitoring is permitted in connection with quality control. Notice to the parties to the call is often required. If the employer realizes that the call is personal, monitoring must cease immediately. (Hartman, L., DesJardin, J. 2011, p261)

In my opinion, in most instances, employers can monitor phone calls at the workplace. Call monitoring actually refers to two activities, listening to live phone calls and recording phone conversations. The company that I am working also monitors phone calls with customers for reasons of quality control.

Monitoring improve performance

One of main reasons of call monitoring is to improve job performance. When employers actively listen to employees' phone calls and know how they perform their job duties, it is more easily for identifying those who need additional training. Monitoring helps isolate specific work habits and behaviors that might be contributing to poor performance. Moreover, monitoring also ensures that workers do their best, because most employers notice them about potential monitoring activity. (Helen Akers)

Monitoring increase customer satisfaction

When employees are aware that their work activities are being monitored, they're more likely to focus on serving customers in the best manner possible. For example, in the call center industry, agent calls are continuously monitored. This encourages them to adhere to policies and procedures on each call. The monitoring also encourages them to ensure they are resolving issues to the customer's satisfaction. (Helen Akers)

With many years of analysis, design, and installation of call center systems for some of Province Telecommunications companies throughout Vietnam, I have many experiences on monitoring agents. Workers in call centers almost always have their calls monitored. Different aspects of their tasks, such as length of call, time period between calls, content of calls, abandonment rate (the percentage of callers who hang up or disconnect prior to answer), average talk time, politeness towards customers, adherence to set procedures, can be monitored. Employers argue that this is done to ensure that customers are given the correct information, to protect workers from false complaints from the customers. In some cases, it can be used to determine performance related pay.

This raises serious questions about privacy and human dignity. Monitoring in the way it is implemented in call centers is bad for workers' health and well-being. It create unfavorable working conditions, such as cope with work, lack of involvement, reduced peer and supervisor support, fear of job loss, lack of control over tasks and low level of job satisfaction.

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