Employee Monitoring Paper

1167 Words3 Pages

Introduction

Employers simply want their employees to be doing the best possible job that they can. However, with the ever-growing pace of technology, it has been harder than ever to keep up with everyone around you. Especially in younger generations entering the workforce, they are known to be lazy and completely addicted to technology. Younger generations are not the only people guilty of these traits, however since more and more millennials are graduating college and entering the workforce, it has become more of an obvious trend. It has also become increasingly difficult for employers to keep track of their employees’ productivity. Some employees slack off during work hours- between making personal phone calls, playing video games, or …show more content…

Employee monitoring can occur in many different ways. The first way is telephone monitoring. This is when an employer listens to an employee’s phone calls at work. Employers may monitor calls with clients or customers for quality control reasons. There is an exception for personal calls, however. Under Federal Case Law, when an employer realizes that the call is personal, he or she must immediately stop monitoring the call. This could still be risky for employees because they can get in trouble for making personal phone calls during business hours or on their business phones. If the employees at a certain business location are wearing headsets, the conversations on said headsets are subject to monitoring as well. Conversations on these headsets can be monitored, even if they are just conversations between coworkers. However, most headsets have “mute” buttons on them, so employees can easily turn them off. Employers can also obtain a record of their employees’ phone calls. A device called a “pen register” can record telephone numbers dialed from office/business phones. It allows the employer to see a list of phone numbers dialed by a certain employee’s extension and the length of each call. This information may be used to see if employees make personal calls, and how frequent and lengthy they are. However, this information may also be used to evaluate the amount of time each employee spends on the phone with

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