Employee Monitoring Legal, Ethical, and Managerial Elements

Employee Monitoring Legal, Ethical, and Managerial Elements

Employee Monitoring Legal, Ethical, and Managerial Elements

The terrorist attacks of New York's World Trade Center and Washington's Pentagon raised issues of security to an all-time high in the United States. Employers have expanded know-how and execution of employee observation in the workplace. In addition to safety concerns, businesses need to be able, by right, to protect any of their trade secrets, and to protect the business name and reputation against any outsiders and even employees that might cause damage to them. This paper will delve into the legal, ethical, and managerial elements as they apply to employee monitoring.

Management has a major duty to ensure that company employees execute their responsibilities by working full time on their stated objectives (Halpern, Reville, Grunewald, 2007). Management would be remiss in its duties if they did not oversee their employees and make sure they do not waste valuable company time, they are being compensated for, on private business. In doing this, management is helping to protect the company's shareholders economic interest and preventing a possible loss in its shares of stock. Care must be given by management when handling legal issues, to set a balance of its objectives in the protection of property rights, bolstering productivity, profitability, and also maintaining the morale of its employees. While doing all of this, management also has to exercise care to comply with all relevant Federal and State laws (Halpern, et. al, 2007).

With the growth of technology, management is tasked with the chore of reviewing employee's e-mail and computer files. Many companies block access to various Internet websites and others install software programs on company computers that will record activity on all Network computers. Software such as Activity Monitor gives the employer a live view of remote desktops, web surfing history logging, and real time tracking and recording of all URL's visited in a browser. A complete history of user communication can be stored and messages typed in all web forums on both sides can be seen in keystrokes and a series of screen shots. These just touch the surface of what software programs can monitor.

Management must continually be aware of the legal issues involving employee monitoring. A common impression by some employee complaints is that reviewing e-mail is an infringement of the constitutional right to free speech. However, the first amendment only constrains governmentally imposed restrictions on speech (Hodson, Englander, Englander, 1999). Other complaints state that e-mail monitoring is unethical and violates federal and state wiretapping statutes, or is an invasion of privacy. Courts, however, uphold that the employer is the owner of the e-mail system and the privacy