The Legal, Ethical, and Managerial Concerns of Employee Monitoring

Identify and examines various legal, ethical, and managerial elements as they apply to employee monitoring.

As a society, we are now personifying the legal and ethical monitoring of our employers. Due to the many choices that are made on a daily basis at home and work, issues concerning legal as well as ethical concerns has ascended, on how employees interact in regards to practices that reinforces how the corporate world practice their business. Have businesses become transparent of their workers, or the lack of ethic involved in maintaining fairness in the workplace when it comes to functioning within that corporation? What aspects are legal when monitoring the employees when given the resources to complete task in a timely manner? When you are supplied with technology that allows a person to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently, as a norm, there is a certain level of “privacy” anticipated to complete the assigned work without the fear of being watched and tracked on your performance or behavior.

When defining “employee monitoring” it is methods used by employers in the workplace to gather pertinent information regarding “employees’ activities and location to improve productivity.” (Wigmore, I. and Rouse M. 2014) As an employee, your “privacy rights are limited when it is relevant to an employer. It is of utmost importance in understanding the rights of an employer to monitor your email, phone calls (personal and business), Internet and computer usage. A company may have standard set of rules that limits your personal calls and also the use of the computer for “work related” projects only. They provide you with the material and are paying you to perform a duty while you are there and is not a perk for enjoyment but a convenience to do a job well done.

As an employee your obligation is to act ethically and your integrity is to transact business in a way that has an impact on the stability of your employers business. When we perform tasks, we seldom acknowledges our decisions in regards to ethics or moral values as they pertains to our everyday dealings when we continually make sound decisions. “Ethical decisions are difficult because they involve value-centered life issues that cannot be grasped solely through empirical/objective means.” (Progressus, 2010) In dealing with the day-to-day decisions we are using ethics. Thus, dealing with the business moral obligations, we are socially responsible to ascertain that as a key member of the organization that sound decisions are made.

Social responsibility and ethics are present together and have to coincide with the other and not independent of the other decision. Your beliefs determines whether or not you regards the decisions you make as either right or wrong. When “analyzing employee location monitoring and its appropriateness or inappropriateness. Ethics either supplies or justifies a coherent