Your Firm and the Data Protection Act

4. Monitoring Employees

In broad terms, the Act establishes that employee monitoring may be carried out only where any detriment to the employee is offset by the benefit to the employer (or others).

4.1 You are required to be open about the nature, extent and reasons for monitoring.

• For example, you might want to monitor excessive private use of the telephone because the bills are too high.
• Or monitor Internet access for the downloading of illegal pornography.
• Secret monitoring can only be justified in exceptional circumstances such as suspected criminal activity.

4.2 Limit monitoring to the amount necessary to achieve a legitimate business objective.

• Define what you want to achieve. Ignore matters outside this remit unless they are so serious no reasonable employer could fail to take action - such as serious breaches of health and safety rules.
• Remember your employees are entitled to a degree of privacy, even in the work environment.
• If you use video or audio monitoring, target it and keep it to areas where expectations of privacy are low.

4.3 Remember your employees have a right to see all the information you have on them.

• Don't keep the results of your monitoring, once they have served their purpose.