Employees' Right to Privacy

Employee Right to Privacy
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Employee Right to Privacy
A crucial employee right in the workplace is privacy. In particular, privacy entails the right of people to be left alone. In the context of business, privacy rights involve safeguarding a person’s life from the employer’s unwarranted intrusion (Lawrence & Weber, 2016). Numerous individuals believe that their bosses should not snoop on their political or religious views, credit histories, and health conditions. However, it is challenging to draw a clear line between what employers should not check and what they should do when it comes to their workers. Exceptions are permissible when the interests of business owners are influenced by those of their employees. People’s right to privacy should be extended in the workplace with the exception of unwarranted incursion to promote the firm’s interests.
Employee electronic monitoring should be allowed only when individuals are working, but it should not intrude on people’s right to privacy when not working. The highly dynamic technological changes have facilitated the use of email, Internet browsing, smartphones, social media sites, video sharing, and location tracking (Lawrence & Weber, 2016). As such, companies are allowed to monitor, gather, and analyze their employees’ activities to safeguard their reputations. Besides, they provide electronic gadgets to their workers, meaning that these devices should not be used for personal reasons, but only for business-related tasks. Based on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (1986), employers have the right to monitor and gather information related to job communication (Lawrence & Weber, 2016). As a result, employee electronic monitoring can help prevent issues such as sexual harassment and sharing business trade secrets with competitors.
The right to privacy should be violated when romance occurs in the workplace. Although workers should be left to select their life partners without privacy intrusion, they need to do it outside their workplace. According to one director of human resources, the workplace is where individuals meet nowadays and spend more time together. In a 2013 survey, it was clear that about 38% of employees admitted that they had dated their coworkers at least once and a third of these relationships led to marriage (Lawrence & Weber, 2016). Nevertheless, Lucy Garcia, the senior human resource business partner at Houston, asserts that the most significant issues to consider are sexual harassment, conflict of interest, and hostile work environment claims (Gurchiek, 2020). As such, organizations should have a clear workplace romance policy so that workers can understand when they are subject to monitoring or privacy violation. For instance, if a relationship breakup causes sexual harassment lawsuit, a firm can investigate and ask employees to check their electronic gadgets to get to the root of the problem. Moreover, employees should be highly discouraged from using office electronic devices in their personal affairs.
Employees’ drug testing is another controversial issue that some individuals arg...