Question

impact of employee privacy rights on employer and employee

Answer 1

Employee privacy rights have a great impact on the performance of the employees and the employers. Due to the technological advancements in today’s digital era, employers can monitor their employees virtually from any place. This has created ethical considerations in workplaces today. Employers monitoring includes audio and video surveillance, emails or computer chats, GPS or location tracking, etc Employers collect personal information of their employees (and potential candidates) such as financial information, health data, bio-metric details for login/attendance, etc. There are restrictions on the collection of these data and this is regulated by SDPI (Sensitive Personal Data or Information rules). Though the legal system permits the employers to monitor their employees to a certain extent, the employers should make wise use of these stipulations. The employer should be careful in dealing with the personal information of their employees and monitoring them in the workplace. The information thus collected should be first analyzed on collection, storage, retrieval, etc to maintain the privacy of the employees’ information.

Employees on the other hand should understand the basic objective of employers’ monitoring in the workplace. Though employee surveillance hinders the privacy of the employees, they should understand that they are used as part of the employee supervision. The impact of employee privacy rights on employee is that they reduce the morale of the employees. This eventually results in reduced productivity in the workplace. When employees have reduced morale, there is no innovation nor did creatively to solve the issues eventually resulting in reduce problem solving.

Thus, employee privacy rights play an important role in organizations. Employee and employers are greatly affected by the employee privacy rights which should be wisely used to maintain harmony in the workplace.