Workplace Surveillance - Essay Example

Business Ethics Report: The CEO Copy Chief Ethical Officer Re: Workplace Surveillance This Report deals with the issue of workplace surveillance that is increasingly being practiced by organizations, where employee emails are scrutinized, sometimes without their knowledge. Since an increasing amount of work is being done online, employee surveillance of employee online activity has become increasingly common. In the year 2000, there were an estimated 40 million workers whose activities were being monitored through workplace surveillance (Botan, 1996). There have been several studies conducted which have shown that electronic surveillance by employers has an adverse impact upon employees and affects job productivity and satisfaction. (Mishra and Crampton, 1998). According to Botan (1996), who conducted a survey among employees who considered themselves to be heavily surveilled vis a vis those who were not so heavily surveilled, the findings were that those employees subjected to heavy amounts of workplace surveillance reported negative effects such as increased uncertainty, a loss in their privacy and reduced amounts of communication. Mishra and Crampton (1998) have also pointed out the ethical aspects involved in the issue of workplace surveillance. The practice ignores the question of fairness and respect for the privacy of employees. In effect, it is equivalent to placing the employees under a public microscope so that they feel under scrutiny all the time. However, at the same time, employers often feel constrained to resort to workplace surveillance to prevent instances of misuse of the online medium by a few employees. When incidence of individuals engaging in pornographic activity is revealed in public and the employee in question happens to be an employee at a particular organization, there is a resulting backlash on the organization in question., The reputation of the Company is affected and it may also become criminally liable for the actions of its employees under the principle of vicarious liability. As a result, many employers are resorting to workplace surveillance in order to maintain a check on employee online activity. In effect, they are resorting to imposing surveillance on all employees in the interest of keeping a tab on the activities of a few individual employees who may engage in this kind of behavior which is detrimental to a firm. Business Ethics refers to the moral principles that govern the kind of behavior which is considered to be acceptable or non acceptable by business people. It refers to what is considered good or bad practice for them. Business ethics may be defined as “the study of business practice at varying levels and contexts through the lenses of moral philosophy and relevant environmental issues.”(www.ibe.org.uk). Ethical considerations invoke the human element and social dynamics of the consumer oriented environment where a failure to maintain ethical standards could result in an adverse impact upon the organization. In the wake of corporate scandals such as Enron, there has been an increasing focus in recent times on the issue of ethical behavior within organizations and there is an increasing cognizance of this issue. As a result, a corporation is faced with a dilemma – on the one hand is the question of protecting itself from adverse publicity and criminal action that may arise due to the illegal online activities of its employees and on the other is the question of maintaining ethical standards within the organization and respecting the privacy of its employees. The Rights Approach in ethics is based upon the principle that every individual has a fundamental right to be respected and must be allowed to lead his or her life. If this freedom is to be provided to an individual, then his or her rights to privacy must be respected. On this basis therefore, any action or policy implemented by a Company will be ethical and moral only if it takes into account the people who are likely to be affected by that decision, to ensure that they are not used “merely as instruments for advancing some goal, but are fully informed and treated only as they have freely and knowingly consented to be treated.” (www.scu.edu). The Fairness approach to ethics examines how fair or unfair a particular action may be when it is distributed among the members of a group. An ethical fairness approach requires that all individuals must be treated the same, in a consistent manner “unless there are morally relevant differences between them”.(www.scu.edu). On this basis therefore, there are some general principles which would apply in the case of everyone on the basis of simple morality and fairness for all. There will be an exception to this principle only if some members are to be excluded on the basis of moral repugnance. Yet another approach to ethics is the common good approach, where the single factor that will condition whether a decision is ethical or not is whether it is beneficial to the community and works in favor of the common good. On this basis therefore, the principle that will hold good is: “What is ethical is what advances the common good”. (www.scu.edu). Applying this in the context of workplace surveillance, it could be argued that when an organization introduces workplace surveillance, it seeks to protect itself and therefore advances the goal of responsible online use by its employees. Deontology in ethics dictates that people are expected to adhere to their obligations and duties.(Ridley 1998). Therefore, there is undoubtedly a duty that employees have to their employers, in that they should not use the online resources provided to them by the employer to engage in personal pursuits, especially such as pornography. An employee has a duty to be loyal to his or her employer and function in a responsible manner in the workplace. By the same token however, employers also have a duty to their employees, to protect their interests. The question that arises is whether workplace surveillance is the right method to achieve this end. From the perspective of the employer, it is a tough situation because each option – to introduce workplace or not – has consequences that affect its reputation and position in the public eye. However, when the Rights approach is applied to the problem, it would appear that the Company that seeks to promote its goal of responsible online use by employees may be unwittingly intruding upon the privacy of its employees. If a company introduces workplace surveillance without the knowledge of its employees, it will be totally unethical under the fairness principle because actions must be undertaken by businesses only with the full and informed consent of the employees. Assuming that surveillance is introduced with the knowledge of the employees, it may still be unethical because the employees are in effect, being used to advance the goal of the Company to protect its public reputation without heeding the fact that it may be intruding upon the privacy of its employees. The fact that employee surveillance has been shown to produce negative effects such as absenteeism, diminished confidence, etc as per studies mentioned above, means that it is not acceptable to employees. Unless and until an action or policy pursued by the Company is acceptable to the employees and is undertaken with their free and fair consent, it will not be an ethical action. Moreover, it amount to punishing all the employees in general and compromising their privacy for the misdeeds of a few employees who misuse the online medium. Applying the fairness approach, workplace surveillance becomes even more unethical. This approach requires all employees to be treated with fairness and a consistent approach needs to be used with all of them. The fairness approach requires people to be treated the same unless there are “Morally relevant differences” between them. This is of course the case, because a few employees are engaging in immoral acts, therefore the ethical course of action for a Company to follow in this case would be to institute punitive action only against those employees who are actually caught in the act of online misuse. For instance, an organization that seeks to use workplace surveillance because it suspects that some of its employees may be misusing the online medium, must first take steps to make all employees aware that spot checks could be conducted anytime on their online activity, rather than actually carrying them out. The deterrent effect of such a threat would itself hold back those employees who are tempted to misuse the electronic medium. An organization that randomly conducts checks on sporadic occasions would not be engaging in conduct which may be perceived to be unfair to employees. Since employees will be aware that most of their work is private, they will not be uncomfortable or restricted at the workplace through the intrusion on their privacy, while at the same time, they may desist from illegal activity because of the awareness that checks could be conducted anytime. Applying the Common good approach, the issue of workplace surveillance encroaches upon the privacy and freedom of all employees, therefore it does not contribute to the common good and cannot be considered to be ethical. An ethical decision is that which will advance the common good. It is in the interests of the employees that the organization is able to function in the marketplace with an untarnished reputation. However this cannot be achieved through a lack of respect of the employers for the employees and their rights to privacy. Ensuring the common good within an organization means that the rights of the employees as a collective whole must be protected. These rights include the right to privacy, the right to freedom of communication in the workplace and the right to function without stress or restrictions at work. In many organizations productivity and growth can be fostered only in an environment where employees are allowed to flourish and try out their ideas, where their rights and privacy is respected. An employee cannot function effectively if he or she feels that there is constant monitoring, which makes them self conscious and unproductive. Therefore in the long run, workplace surveillance turns out to be counter productive to the common good. Although the goal that the company seeks to achieve is to target and prevent illegal activity, it tries to achieve this through an unethical method of workplace surveillance, which contravenes the ethical goal of achieving the common good. Conclusions: In view of the above, workplace surveillance is unethical no matter which approach is applied to the problem. Ii contravenes the common good, it intrudes upon the privacy of employees and demonstrates a lack of respect for their privacy and it also demonstrates a degree of unfairness because the illegal activities of a few result in the punishment of the many. The best solution lies in removing workplace surveillance. It is better for organizations to make the Company objectives clearly known to employees and to make them aware that punitive action will be taken against employees misusing the electronic medium. In this way, when employees have been made aware of the consequences, it will be ethical and fair if they are punished by the Company for engaged in activity that is prohibited. It is also true that an employer can become aware of illegal online activity only through periodic surveillance. However such surveillance cannot be a regular feature; rather it should be conducted on rare occasions and only when there are grounds which exist to suspect that there may be some degree of misuse. In such instances, if the organization has also warned employees beforehand that it may conduct spot checks anytime, it will be quite ethical for the Company to conduct sporadic checks. Employees will be aware that this is only a rare occurrence and likely to be instituted only on suspicion of illegal activity; however it will also serve as a warning to employees to desist from such activities out of the fear of being caught on a surprise raid. This would be a much more effective and more ethical way in which organizations can control illegal activity of its employees. References: * “Approaching Ethics” Retrieved November 5, 2007 from: http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/approach.html * Botan, C.H., 1996. “Communication work and electronic surveillance: A model for predicting panoptic effects”, Communication Monographs, 63: 293-313. * Mishra, J.M. and Crampton, S.M., 1998. “Employee Monitoring: Privacy in the workplace”, SAM Advanced Management Journal, 4-14. * Ridley, Aaron, 1998. “Beginning Bioethics.” New York: St. Martin’s Press. * Teaching Business Ethics.” Institute of Business Ethics. Retrieved October 30, 2007 from: http://www.ibe.org.uk/teaching/home.html (c20033684) Read More