Take the right way to monitor employees
Before you bring any surveillance solution into your company, have you already a good reason to monitor employees? If a company takes surveillance measures a step further--monitoring employee e-mail and Internet surfing, for instance--red flags may be raised about privacy concerns. Being employers, you have to face such risks – reduced productivity, liability claims and loss of assets.
Is this really a problem?
Employees’ surveillance may have two parts; one is visible actions, such as posting guards in building lobbies to check ID badges. And other one is less obvious monitoring, such as tracking what websites have been visited, whether or not your employees chatting with his/her buddies via IM and copying important files to any portable storages. However these employees’ monitoring have involved with individual privacy.
Most time some behaviors of productivity loss and potential liability are much obvious. For examples, an employee spending hours each day writing personal e-mails and visiting websites of personal interest may be wasting time on the company clock. And some employees download music files, personal photos and video clips which may slow system response time and require increased expenditures for storage capacity. All these need be highly concerned for employers. If you ignore these, the following results will be really serious.
Understanding risks, then choose appropriate surveillance solution
An effective employee-monitoring program begins with the identification of the risks to be managed. Defining corporate objectives first, and then crafting a program to achieve those goals, helps a company defend a monitoring policy if it is later challenged in court or in the press. Almost lost in the hailstorm of criticism directed at Hewlett-Packard's leak investigation was the company's strong and legitimate interest in the secrecy that should surround board deliberations and company strategy. Moreover, defining and weight the importance of objectives first helps a company ensure that the allocation of risk management resources appropriately corresponds to the company's perception of the size of the risk.
An effective employee surveillance program must perfectly integrate with current business network environment. For better doing this, understanding what risks of your company are and then develops specific surveillance policy to manage these. Many companies have own risks according their network environment. But the following is a list of common risks you should take into account.
- Focusing maximum resources on work. The Internet and e-mail can be great time wasters, but 40% of these are not related with work. Keeping employees away from these websites that will boost employees’ productivity and efficiency.
- Reducing inappropriate jokes, pornographic website material and offensive racial, sexual or religious comments which can spread rapidly with the aid of e-mail and the Internet.
- Protecting your important documents and never let them be accessed much easily. Businesses document is being stolen via a few of clicks to copy to personal storage device or sent via emails. It is much easier than ever, so keep this in mind.
- Avoiding any internet abused behavior, such as download music, obtain video clips, watching streaming video and shopping online at ebay or amazon.
Companies should thoughtfully craft their policies and implement them clearly and consistently. A best practices approach to employee monitoring involves identification of the risks of concern, careful analysis of how monitoring would help manage those risks, and clear communication of expectations and consequences.
