Workplace electronic surveillance and eavesdropping
Workplace electronic surveillance and eavesdropping at the workplace refers to the activities and systems put in place by employers to monitor the activities, location and communication of their workers either with the knowledge of the employees or not (West, Bowman, " Gertz, 2014). The surveillance can be conducted with different intentions including assessing the performance levels of workers, ensuring employee’s health and safety, controlling misuse and mismanagement of organizational resources like working time, communication channels among others. Some of the ways through which employers can monitor their workers include, storage and review of computer files and phone calls and voice mail and video recording of employees.
Section 2: Ethics and Morals of Surveillance and Eavesdropping
While the terms “moral” and “ethical” are used interchangeably, they are different in that ethics refers to rules defined by external sources like religion, workplace code of conduct among others while morals relate to personal principles about right or wrong. Ethics are based on the societal definition of right or wrong wile morals are defined by a person's belief that something is right or wrong. It is, therefore, possible that something can be moral yet unethical or ethical yet morally unacceptable. The two terms also differ in flexibility where ethics tend to be consistent within a particular context but can vary between contexts while moral is usually consistent and can only change with a change in an individual’s belief.
The morality and ethics of surveillance and eavesdropping
lie on the intention of the employer. When the employer intends to transparently employ the monitoring tool to oversee and receive feedback to maintain coherence and consistency in the enterprise, the exercise is ethical. Every organization has rules and regulations and employees knows the do's and don'ts of their workplaces, employers are responsible for ensuring that the workers act as expected and surveillance and eavesdropping is only a system to help employers to confirm that the worker's behavior is in line with the organizational expectations. However, when employers install surveillance in private areas like washrooms, it is unethical. On the other hand, Surveillance and eavesdropping are not moral because they infringe on personal rights of privacy of the employees. Through surveillance and eavesdropping, an employer can gain access to personal information about an employee that may make him or her treat the employee differently. For example, when an employer overhears a conversation between an employee and a doctor and learns that the worker has AIDS, he or she may end up treating the patient differently.
Section 3: Necessity of Surveillance
In the contemporary workplaces, there exist compelling reasons to employee behavior at work making surveillance and eavesdropping a necessity. Surveys by American Management Association (AMA) policy institute and the US News between 2001 and 2007 found out that surveillance practices gained considerable popularity where many employers adopted the practice (Sims, " Sauser, 2015).
It is a primary objective for every employer to ensure performance. Employers, therefore, monitor their staff to ensure adherence to prescribed levels of performance. Through monitoring, it is possible for employers to identify training needs in cases of poor performance and reward high performers as a motivation strategy. Security is an essential element in an organization. Monitoring ensures early detection of risky behaviors like theft, hazardous appliances like broken doors, accounting errors among others thus increasing the accuracy of planning and containment. Surveillance and eavesdropping is also a safety measure as it ensures that employees do not share organizational information either verbally or electronically to competitors to sabotage corporate operations. In the contemporary world, information is one of the most valuable assets that organizations should protect with all means possible, and surveillance is an effective strategy (Singh, " Gupta, 2017). For example, installation of software in the organizational computers can be used to enable employers to monitor data traffic within the corporate system.
Section 4: Ethical Uses of Surveillance
Surveillance eavesdropping is often abused owing to the increased advancement in technology that allows such vices. In the contemporary world, people use technology both to communicate and to access work-related information at any time and place. However, the electronic platform is often abused. Electronic surveillance and eavesdropping can be performed ethically by ensuring an acceptable extent of monitoring. Employers should only monitor work-related activities and should desist from infringing on the rights to privacy for example by tapping into employees mobile phones to track their communication either when on or off duty. Employers should also make it known to workers that they are being monitored by informing them of the existence of the monitoring systems. For the surveillance to be ethical, it would also be paramount to have a written policy specifying the employee's expected code of conduct (Singh, " Gupta, 2017).
References
Sims, R. R., " Sauser, W. I. (2015). Legal and regulatory issues in human resources management.
Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Singh, A. N., " Gupta, M. P. (2017). Information Security Management Practices: Case Studies from India. Global Business Review, DOI: 10.1177/0972150917721836.
West, J. P., Bowman, J. S., " Gertz, S. (2014). Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace. Legal and Regulatory Issues in Human Resources Management, 285.
