Spying on your employees is always a sensitive topic. Is it legal to secretly spy on your employees?
The law states that as long as your employees are on company time, the employer may direct and control their activities. This includes, monitoring, or spying, on their online activity. There is no absolute law stating that an employer has to divulge he or she is spying on employees. However, as a reasonable and good-faith employer, it is nice to let your staff know they are being monitored for business efficiency purposes.
Here’s a quick 5-step process in how to tell your employees you’re monitoring their online activity:
- Check your state guidelines for employee spying. Make sure it is still legal in your state, and follow the proper IT support policy process.
- Be open with your employees. Let them know how you will be accessing their computers.
- Remember, as an employer, you don’t necessarily need to purchase key-stroke IT software or spying software. It is known that corporate e-mail and computer files are company property. You can scan this info when the employee is not in the office as spot-check quality assurance checks.
- Phone records may be checked also. It’s legal to check since this is also company property. This will prevent those blabbermouths who are looking to avoid tallying a computer trail.
- Along with proactive spying, an website policy should be implemented, preventing access to illicit content and possibly social sites.
Overall, you don’t want to go overboard with online spying. I, once, had a manager who had his IT staff, including myself, join up on MSN messenger to be buddies with him so we can chat business in the day. The manager was in Indiana so this was a good way to communicate. I realized that with the MSN messenger, he was able to see when everyone got to the office since it showed when our profiles were active. I was able to bypass that by having another computer at home active with this logon early in the morning. 🙂 The manager went a step ahead by using a monitoring software that allowed him to see all of our chat messages with other buddies. Now, that’s going a bit far. We found this out the hard way when one of our IT guys got scolded at for making fun of our manager with another buddy! It was hilarious, but an eye-opener at the same time.
The take-away message is that you, as an employer, should be open with your employees. Help them work with your work efficiency policy. Let them know what websites are forbidden. Look, everybody will need to connect with family and friends in the day. That’s fine as long as the work is getting done, and slacking off is not contagious. Employers and employees should be working together, not against each other.
