Workplace Privacy - It's a Hot Topic

It's a slow news week on the labour and employment front, so I'm digging into some old posts.  I'm speaking at the upcoming Six Minute Labour Lawyer at the Law Society of Upper Canada on the issue of "Workplace Surveillance".  The law in Ontario at least is incredibly fragmented on this issue and the cases are difficult (if not impossible) to reconcile.  In any event, this is a discussion for another day.  However, employee privacy permeates most of the surveillance cases so, in conducting research for my paper, I searched my Old Blog and came up with the following post:

"There are a couple of articles on the 2005 Workplace Privacy survey commissioned by the Society for Human Resource Management and CareerJournal.com(see:Survey Suggests Employees Doubt Workplace-Monitoring Motives and You May Have Less Privacy At Work Than You Think).

The articles highlight a number of areas of disconnect between employees and employers as relates to monitoring.  For example:

• Nearly 90% of HR professionals believe that the company has a right to "monitor Internet use" as compared to "about 60% of employees".
  
• Over 50% of HR professionals believe that it is okay to read employee e-mails as contrasted with 28% of employees.
• According to the HR professionals surveyed, the top reasons that they monitor employees are " protecting  against computer viruses, keeping proprietary information from being compromised  and maintaining workplace safety"
• Employees, on the other hand, "think their companies monitor employees to ensure productivity, to keep proprietary information safe, to monitor job performance, to track time spent on personal business, to protect itself from litigation and to see whether or not employees are job hunting"

According to the Information Week article:

"Up to 34% of employees believe the reason that employers engage in these practices is because management doesn't trust them," Williams says. "But we found that only 2% of companies [used monitoring] to determine whether an employee was applying for a job elsewhere or because the management doesn't trust employees."

There are certainly numerous legal issues that must be considered when "monitoring" employees. However, it is equally important to consider and address the practical issues (i.e. on employee morale, among others). Many of the legal and practical issues can be dealt with and managed through careful planning and communication with employee, including through the implementation of appropriate policies."

It should be noted, that the resources in this post refer to US sources, and Canadians should exercise caution given the differences in the law.  However, this posts and the articles emphasize some key difference in perceptions that are worthy of note.