Surveillance | Where does employee privacy end?

Workplace privacy is a complex issue for HR. Whilst employees should indeed have some level of privacy – we don’t want to live in an Orwellian dystopia just yet, do we? – the job of the company is, of course, to ensure that all workers are safe and that the ethics of the company aren’t being abused.

It may sound rather dramatic, but surveillance at work is actually very much simply the norm, and as technology advances, the methods used by the powers that be are transforming and advancing to truly gain an all-seeing-eye approach to the office.

For HR, the moral dilemma of surveillance should really come down to intention; whilst micromanaging is heavily discouraged by nearly every successful HR representative under the sun, you’d be hard-pressed to find a company that isn’t interested in logging exactly what their workers are up to. If for no other reason, surveillance can be extremely useful for discovering if HR policies are being broken, or if specific employees are the cause of office-based dissonance.

So how is HR monitoring workers?