Monitoring

Tips on monitoring staff

Remember:

• Monitoring is usually intrusive.

• Workers legitimately expect to keep their personal lives private.

• Workers are entitled to some privacy in the work environment.

Consider whether alternative approaches or different methods of monitoring would deliver the benefits you want, while being more acceptable to workers. Can you target the monitoring at an area of risk, for example the part of your premises where you think theft is occurring?

Recommendations and Best Practice

• Ensure your workers are aware that they are being monitored and why. You could tell them this by putting a notice on a notice-board or signs in the areas where monitoring is taking place. If your workers have computers, you could send them an e-mail about the monitoring. If you are open about it, they will know what to expect.

• If monitoring is to be used to enforce your rules and standards, make sure workers know clearly what these are.

• Only use information obtained through monitoring for the purpose for which you carried out the monitoring, unless the monitoring leads to the discovery of an activity that no employer could reasonably be expected to ignore, for example breaches of health and safety rules that put other workers at risk.

• Keep secure the information that you gather through monitoring. This might mean limiting the number of people with access to this information to one or two people. Don’t keep the information for longer than necessary or keep more information than you really need. This might mean deleting it once disciplinary action against a worker is over.

More information

• Quick Guide to Employment Practices Code from the Information Commissioner’s Office.

This content comes from The University of Essex