![]() The primary questions to ask here are: who are you monitoring? what are you monitoring? Where are you monitoring? When are you monitoring? Productive vs. One of the things to be considered is where an employee’s time is being spent. One ethical question starts to become at which point does employee monitoring impose on their personal privacy? It depends of course on the means of how you apply the employee monitoring. With a variety of tools at your disposal will you monitor every keystroke, every email, every mouse movement? Will there be exceptions such as when they’re on their personal bank accounts? These questions come up often which reveal some of the flaws of a pure “ends justify the means” approach towards security. The most important stakeholder beyond yourself here are your employees, whose labor hold up the organization. Is it to mitigate insider threats? Protect critical assets? Process optimization? It is important to understand why you seek to monitor employees as it sets the ethical foundation when you work with stakeholders to carry out your plan. Before rushing to monitor employee it is important to consider why you seek to do so. Employee Monitoring & Ethical Considerationsĭo the ends justify the means? This line is common when questions about security arise in organizations, however by not questioning the means of implementation, monitoring policy, impacts, or even legal violations some organizations can find themselves in trouble. This often results in poor guidance for respecting employees and siloing security off from the other ethical considerations of business and government. When it comes to security it is very common that writers will briefly touch on ethics, and often it is from a purely teleology perspective. Something such as always being truthful for example, could be considered right. The most important factor here is consistency of action. Under the deontological prism, an action can be ethically good even if it produced a negative consequence. Meanwhile, the deontological perspective of ethical consideration places actions and motives as the primary basis for what is right and wrong. ![]() In other words, under this view the “ends justify the means.” the ethical action under this view is which ever produces the most effective outcome for the most people. Teleology (utilitarian) is a form of ethical consideration that places the consequences or outcomes as the central basis for moral judgement. Resolving these ethical tensions is a common challenge we all face and as a result we develop forms of processing these tensions. For example you (micro ethic) may value liberty and freedom at all costs for society, but employee monitoring as a practice (meso ethic) could conflict with your personal view. Wherever these spheres of ethics interact we face greater tension in our decision making. Both of which are important to understand when it comes to a topic such as employee monitoring.Įthics is never really a consistent exercise for most people as we all operate within three spheres of ethics: micro (personal), meso (organizational), and macro (sector-wide/society). When people, institutions, or society is considering how to act in a given situation there are two popular forms of ethical consideration, teleology and deontological. Linda Elder who are both leading authorities in the fields of ethics and critical thinking. Ethics can simply be defined as “ a set of concepts and principles that guide us in determining what behavior helps or harms sentient creatures” according to Dr. So let us begin! What are Employee Monitoring Ethics?īefore diving into the ethics of Employee Monitoring it is important to define very quickly what ethics are, and what context we will explore them through here. By the end of this article you should have new questions and frameworks to explore this topic through. This article will explore the ethics, legal considerations, and impacts of employee monitoring. Exploring the ethics of employee monitoring can help you to understand whether you should monitor at your organization, if so then how you will implement employee monitoring. Employee monitoring has produced a lot of positive contributions to organizations, however as tools have advanced so too has the complexity of negative impacts as well. While most employers are well within their rights to monitor activity that occurs within their business, there are both legal and ethical considerations to keep in mind. It has become common understanding among people that when they begin work at an organization, there is a high chance that their activity will be monitored.
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