Employee Data Privacy

Employee and Data Privacy Overview

Employee privacy and data is of great importance in the workplace. Employees’ personal information is gathered, stored and processed. With increased mobility of employees and advancement in technology, it has become increasingly difficult to get a grasp on the digitalized workplace. Acceptable use and disclosure of employees’ personal information should be limited to the use of the organization and comply with legal obligations and laws. Organizations are faced with many challenges due to the implementation and formation of labor policy (Gross, 2012). Workplace monitoring has become a controversial practice but organizations must maintain an environment in which transparency and accountability are top priorities, to ensure an effective workflow (Duermyer, 2007).

Legal and Ethical Challenges

Employee personal details and contact information is essential and vital to financial management and human resources (Hagen, 2011). Companies are legally required to get employee’s consent prior to obtaining such information. Once information is obtained, human rights, legal obligations, local law minimizes the vulnerabilities and protects the rights of employees. Theses laws are in favor of the employees but there is still possibility coercion, threats and intimidation. The National Relations Board in the United States has implemented new policies that jeopardize the privacy of workers (Gross, 2012). This policy provided labor officials access to employee’s names, home addresses and phone numbers. The policy proved to be very confrontational and litigious, stripping the sense of community from the workplace. According to Gross (2012), people are alone in life and therefore cherish their solidarity and independence. The above policy mitigates that independence which is central to the humanity of employees.

In order for organizations to keep honest people honest they must implement some form of surveillance in the workplace. The advancement in technology makes it possible to create guidelines surrounding employee monitoring. Different organizational entities prescribe different guidelines. Although their motives are all identical, there still lies some legal liability. Privacy is essential to a positive work environment, but there are many ethical concerns when monitoring the actions of employees (Busny, 2009). Many organizations enforce some form of monitoring for personal and or professional technology. Such monitoring includes email filtering, activity monitoring and keystroke regulation (Rosen, 2000). Employees describe this monitoring process as being bias and invasive. The Fourth Amendments protects employees from such right but there is also a conflict of interest when employee’s privacy is being invaded by workplace guidelines.

Recommended Practices

The Fourth

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