There are many reasons business owners might want to monitor the digital footprints of their employees, from protecting your company from theft to ensuring your workplace is free of harassment. But you need to do it right. Legally and ethically.
There can be several reasons in favor of monitoring. First, it can help protect your company from theft or other harm. Monitoring can also help affirm compliance with regulations, secure evidence in case of lawsuits and ensure the workplace is free of harassment. At least two thirds of companies monitor and half have fired employees for Web and email infractions.
Potential Pitfalls of Monitoring:
You could create a morale problem and hurt employee performance if your workers feel a distrustful Big Brother is lurking over their shoulders. You could inadvertently learn about people’s religion, sexual orientation, political views and medical problems, creating potential privacy dilemmas or even opening your firm up to discrimination lawsuits. And you could run afoul of the National Labor Relations Board if you discipline employees for making negative comments about you online.
Monitoring vs. Surveillance:
It isn’t controversial or obtrusive to monitor events on a company’s computer system to ensure proper use and protect the company’s assets and reputation. General monitoring for electronic abuses, with employees’ full knowledge, is a necessary practice. Employees will put your business at risk accidentally or intentionally. You need to mitigate those risks to keep misdeeds from turning into expensive crises or lawsuits.
Let me give you my ethics on digital monitoring. Employees should have no expectation of digital privacy at work.
- It’s your network hardware the data is traveling through.
- It’s your computer they are using.
- It’s your time that you are paying for.
- It’s your email address they are using. (No, it’s not theirs and they have no legal expectation of privacy.)
It’s your company. Put the policies in place that you see fit. Technology can support policies to ensure appropriate use of your assets and protect your business, BUT, the policies must be in place FIRST.
Create a Technology Policy:
Write a technology policy. If you need help with this you can use customizable forms offered by the ePolicy Institute or have On-site Tech Support help you with this. (This is free for our Managed Service Customers). We can outline your rules for using and tracking email and instant messaging, Web surfing and blogging and downloading software on company devices. Make sure your policies also cover employees’ use of their own devices while at work and when accessing company data.
Inform Your Workforce:
Explain the risks to the business from improper use of digital assets, the company’s digital policy, the limits on employee privacy in the workplace and the fact that monitoring will occur. As long as your people know you are monitoring to maintain a compliant workplace, you shouldn’t run into morale issues or legal issues. Also, Simply letting people know you’re watching can have an important deterrent effect.
Only Delaware and Connecticut require employers to notify employees about electronic monitoring, but it’s a good CYA practice wherever you live.
Monitoring Social Media Usage:
Content Filtering:
Content filtering has been around for years but recently the prices have come down to very affordable levels. Content filters allow companies to monitor employee activity on the web. If you want more than monitoring, we can set access levels to block certain sites or entire categories of sites to keep employees from accessing sites — from news to porn to gambling. For example, 70% of the bandwidth at one of our customers was going to Facebook and Pandora. With the information from the content filter, the company was able to create an Acceptable Use Policy for the internet and enforce it with the technology by blocking certain sites.
Companies like On-site Tech Support can assess the level of web/social media use a use and implement a content filtering system for as little as $0, depending on the number of users. If you want to uncover what employees are doing and saying, call us for a free evaluation. 619-717-8070.
Gateway Antivirus:
In addition to content filtering, On-site Tech Support can install a secure Gateway Antivirus. Gateway Antivirus is exactly what it sounds like. Think of this as a bouncer at a bar. Isn’t it better to keep the riff-raff out rather than try to kick them out after they are in? Gateway Antivirus runs on your firewall and scans every packet coming from the internet for malware and viruses. We have one customer, 20 users, 3-4 virus issues per month. We installed Gateway Antivirus and we have had 3 virus issues in the past 3 years.
Tracking use of computers and smartphones:
There are several products are available for tracking activity on company devices. On-site Tech Support does this for many of our clients. We can record everything that occurs on company devices and provide reports about suspect activity.
It’s your company. As long as you have the policies in place you are legally and ethically covered and you can use the technology to enforce those policies.