The Ethics of Employee Surveillance: Where Should Companies Draw the Line

Employee surveillance—whether to monitor productivity, ensure compliance, or protect sensitive data—has significantly increased post-COVID-19. Employers monitor the content of employees' emails and social media accounts, the camera surveillance of whom employees meet, and how the office space is utilized.

Some legal proceedings regarding employee surveillance and data collection have brought this issue to the forefront. In a few cases, excessive surveillance has led to the corrosion of employee trust, damaged their morale, and crossed ethical boundaries. 

In the era of digital employee monitoring—often termed ‘corporate surveillance’—a wide range of stealth tracking tools are now available. Employers have a pool of tools and types of surveillance to select from: live video feeds, keypad tracking, optical character recognition, keystroke recording, location tracking, and, in some cases, screencaptures to be shared with managers at regular intervals—in the name of monitoring and working with employees using behavior analytics. 

Some Do’s and Don’ts of Corporate Surveillance 

In the wake of current situations, organizations must balance excessive surveillance and respecting employees’ privacy. Let’s explore how companies can ethically walk the tightrope while ensuring their workforce stays productive. 

1. Choose monitoring methods and metrics carefully: As new technological advancements happen, new surveillance methods and tools will make their way into corporate monitoring, too. Organizations must consult all stakeholders, from hiring managers to supervisors to those being monitored, before locking in on surveillance methods and metrics. It is important to understand what to monitor, how much to monitor, what falls within the purview of professional surveillance, and what metrics and data should not be considered and infringe upon loss of privacy. Productivity indicators should be selected and shouldn’t merely be based on numbers. Consider the laws and rulings surrounding legal cases in similar matters for a more effective and comprehensive strategy. 

2. Maintain transparency about the surveillance: Organizations need to consider installing visible signage that informs people about camera monitoring and, if possible, add it to the employees' contract as to how they will be monitored. The first step in maintaining any healthy relationship is open communication. Organizations must communicate to their employees about what is being monitored and why and allow them to share their insights for careful consideration. Transparency will increase acceptance rates and will be effective in building trust. If you want to take a step forward, you could also look at sharing the collected data with your employees and taking their views on the findings, and if they want to contest anything, the data provided. 

3. Use it as a tool for reward too, and not just scrutiny. Surveillance and data collection can provide a lot of insight into how organizations can help improve productivity among the workforce. Imagine a situation where you reward the employee for their hustle, which was tracked by the surveillance methods. Build trust in monitoring methods. Ensure it is not just used to highlight inefficiencies but to recognize hard work and effort as well! 

4. Be humane in your approach: One of the most important lessons we all need to learn in the digital age is to be more humane in our approach to everything. We must read beyond the numbers and understand more than just the data. We need to be mindful of the fact that even the best-performing employees will have unproductive days and down phases. In such cases, the supervisors need to talk to their supervisees and determine creative solutions to tackle the problem rather than consider it a threat. These conversations should be aimed at understanding the situation and mitigating risks while helping the employee within the purview of what can be done for them by the organization in case of some personal exigency.

5. Focus on DEI: In a digital-first workspace, surveillance should be designed to foster inclusivity and fairness. Regardless of role, department, or background, every employee should be monitored using uniform standards. No one should feel disproportionately scrutinized or cornered due to unconscious biases in tracking systems. Organizations must conduct periodic audits of their surveillance practices to prevent this and ensure that the tools used do not reinforce systemic inequalities. The goal should be to create an environment where surveillance supports productivity and accountability without making any group feel unfairly targeted or overlooked.

6. Minimize monitoring: Yes, you read that right! The impulse to monitor every possible aspect is understandable, but try to pull back monitoring from areas that have not proven effective in increasing productivity or some areas where things are going perfectly well! Therefore, frequently relooking and reconsidering the methods and metrics is paramount. 

Conclusion

In this day and age, people are the most valuable resource, in this case, employees. It is important to treat employees with the respect they deserve, and in turn, it can also work wonders for your retention efforts. Monitoring should be done within ethical limits and should aim to work as a guard dog rather than an attack dog!