Workplace Surveillance Laws and Perceptions

Workplace surveillance typically involves any of a number of different methods of monitoring or tracking employees, including email monitoring, location tracking, biometrics and covert surveillance (Ball, 2010). Organizations arguing in favor of workplace surveillance typically do so for the purpose of safeguarding assets, but this surveillance has consequences for both employees and employers. Certainly, employee perceptions of their employer will be affected by the degree of and types of surveillance. There are privacy issues at play as well. Creativity and motivation are among the task elements that affected negatively by high levels of surveillance (Ball, 2010). Yet, as the level of workplace surveillance increases, there are unresolved legal issues surrounding the practice, which combined with the high level of controversy will mediate the future directions of such surveillance.

The legal framework for workplace surveillance is patchwork, leading to confusion on certain issues. At the federal level, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act rules that an employer-owned computer is the property of the employer and therefore may be subject to monitoring, and this includes keystrokes, Internet use and any files downloaded or stored on the computer (Worktime,2015). The only protections given to employees under this law are that employers are forbidden to intercept personal communications (i.e. a personal email that does not come through the corporate email client). Otherwise, much of the legal environment exists at the state level, and there can be significant variations from one state to another in this regard (SRHM.org, 2015).

The main point of controversy with these laws is employee privacy. Introna (2003) argues that workplace surveillance in unethical. The basis for his argument is that workplace surveillance first makes the other to be faceless and nameless -- those who are conducting the surveillance are unknown to and distant from the people being surveyed. This alone raises ethical issues, moreover, there are ethical issues surrounding what such faceless others will do with the information that they have gathered.

It is not just libertarians and privacy advocates who question some of the surveillance techniques and the level to which they are sometimes applied in the workplace. Employee perceptions of a high surveillance environment are usually negative -- good people are turned off from working at a company that would disrespect them on such a basic human level. Companies that seek to establish surveillance during onboarding are viewed as coercive and controlling, and that is right at the beginning of the employer-employee relationship. Most employees have boundaries that they feel should not be crossed, and there will be considerable tension in the workplace when such boundaries are crossed. Ultimately, the theoretical "protection of assets" argument has to be weighed against the negative created in a high-surveillance atmosphere- mistrust breeds mistrust and toxicity in the employer-employee relationship is inevitably higher where surveillance is more intense (Allen et al., 2007).