The monitoring of remote workers is a sensitive issue that can have bad consequences for businesses if applied incorrectly. Gita Patel explains that assessment and consultation are the way forward for firms wishing to go down this route.
Avoiding a ‘Big Brother’ management style when monitoring staff who work from home has become more common in many sectors, and recent research by the CIPD shows that over half of bosses agree with monitoring those staff who work from home.
Although many employers would like to closely monitor staff who work from home, employers should be cautious about doing so given the legal and business implications. Before legal implications are considered, however, employers need to consider the effect of monitoring on the relationship with employees, their productivity, morale and stress levels.
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A failure to accommodate employees’ feelings is likely to build resentment, resulting in staff raising grievances or leaving the business entirely to work for an employer who values and trusts them to do the job they have been hired to do.
Incorrect monitoring could even lead to claims for constructive unfair dismissal, discrimination or compensation claims for damage and distress. Staff also have a reasonable right to privacy and a failure to respect this could result in a breach of human rights laws.
How to get monitoring right
An employer may want to monitor their employees for various reasons, from finding ways to improve on performance and productivity to preventing the transition of confidential information and trade secrets.
Whatever the reason, an employer should firstly carry out an impact assessment. An impact assessment would set out the reasons for monitoring, how this could be done, how the information collected will be used and set out the expected benefits and disadvantages of doing so.
The assessment would also consider alternatives to monitoring which could include regularly keeping in touch with staff via phone, email or instant messaging tools when they are working from home.
Once an assessment has been done, an employer should consult with their staff about the proposal and the reasons for it. Consultation is a useful step as it will help an employer justify the reasons for such a controversial policy being proposed, allow employees to voice their concerns about the proposals and allow an employer to consider suggestions made by staff which might help achieve the right balance in order to make the policy an effective one.
If an employer is still mindful to implement a monitoring policy after consultation, the policy should be comprehensively drafted and made available to all staff. Although consent is not required as there may be a legitimate business need for the monitoring, it would be advisable to obtain staff consent where possible.
There are various methods of monitoring staff including by tracking website history, recording phone calls and/or capturing the strokes of a keyboard. These measures can be costly and intrusive. Our advice would be to consider what the business is trying to achieve and see if there are less intrusive ways to achieve this.
For example, to improve staff productivity, a business can start having regular catch-up meetings, sharing work calendars and tracking performance. If a business is planning to monitor its staff, we advise only to monitor what is relevant and necessary, and in accordance with company policy. Ensure the measures being implemented are lawful and proportionate, and if any concerns are raised, ensure these complaints are dealt with fairly, promptly and consistently.
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