Ethical Usage Of Workplace Technologies

Introduction

Technology provides today's business enterprises with much utility and many advantages that businesses of yesteryear were not afforded. As a result, businesses have experienced a significant tradeoff between old ways of doing business in a pen and paper environment to an operational environment that is electronically driven. For example, companies now send mass amounts of electronic mail as opposed to writing letters and mailing them through the US Post Office. Another example is the modern day organization that has the ability to conduct virtual meetings using voice and video technologies in lieu of flying managers to and from various areas of the country and the world. These examples and others carry the implication that business has evolved into an electronic era that allows organizations to realize higher levels of production with greater precision and accuracy at a lower cost due to the usage of various technologies.

While technology has provided today's businesses with a wealth of benefits, the business world perceives a great sense of ethics and responsibility associated with these technologies. A significant portion of ethics and responsibility lies in the realm of ensuring that organizational technologies are being used properly by employees. As a result, more companies in the modern business world are now engaging in electronic monitoring of their employees. Their focus and intent is to ensure that technologies such as computers, telephones, fax machines, and other technological tools in the workplace are not being abused. Companies do so to maintain a level of assurance that workplace technologies are not used in a manner that violates laws, harms or brings discredit to the organization, or deprives the company of productivity while employees that are using their technologies are on the clock. For example, "In 1996, the Morgan Stanley brokerage firm was sued for $70 million by employees offended by e-mails containing racial humor that were sent through the firm's e-mail system (Knowles, 2000)." Proponents of electronic monitoring suggest that this lawsuit could have been prevented if an electronic monitoring system were in place.

The concept of electronic monitoring may be increasing in popularity to employers across the country, but it has created a significant stir of reaction among workers in today's society. The most common perception and rebuttal to electronic monitoring on behalf of workers is that they believe it violates their personal rights to privacy. Worker advocacy groups argue in favor of the worker in this regard by conveying that electronic monitoring violates a worker's Constitutional rights, cause them to be alienated, and induces greater levels of undue stress upon them (Knowles, 2000). An increasing number of employees are gaining this perception, and there is a greater sense of feeling among them that electronic monitoring is not justified and unethical. Those workers that are neutral to electronic monitoring believe that businesses have an ethical obligation to only engage in such activities when it is actually warranted.

So, as a result of the preliminary information presented here, there is now a highly debatable question regarding whether or not employers should have the right to electronically monitor employees in the workplace. This purpose of this paper is to explore the ethical aspects of this debate by analyzing the implications of electronic monitoring in the workplace from the government, employer, and employee perspectives. First, legal perspectives will be analyzed to reflect how government has interpreted the rights of employers and employees with regard to monitoring of electronic information. Second, recurring costs to organizations that are incurred from improper usage of workplace technology by employees will be explored and examined to reflect why more companies are engaging in this activity today. Third, employee privacy rights and concerns will be discussed to present the full perspective of the everyday worker on the subject of electronic monitoring, as well as the effects of those perceptions as it relates to their interaction with and behavior in the working environment.

The last section of this paper will endeavor into a proposed ethical decision making model as it applies to the employees to suggest how they can make ethical decisions with regard to how they use workplace technologies. In addition, prescribed leadership strategies to deter employees from conducting unethical activities discovered from electronic monitoring and when it is ethical to apply those strategies will be discussed. Leadership roles will be considered to suggest what impact leaders of an organization can have to promote a culture that does not tolerate unethical usage and monitoring of technologies. Lastly, the paper will finish with a summarization of the discussion and closing comments.

Literary Review

Development and Enforcement of Legal Implications

As technology has advanced over recent years, legal implications have been explored to determine what rights an employer has with regard to monitoring their employees electronically. Few federal and state laws have been incepted that address the parameters of this question and the laws that do exist continue to evolve as society responds to their implications and effects. The significant piece of legislation to date that addresses electronic monitoring rights is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (Schulman, 1998). Other than this legislation, most of the solid ideologies that have developed and been applied regarding rights that an employer has to electronically monitor employees has stemmed from decisions in civil and criminal legal proceedings in the state and federal court systems. The right that an employer has to monitor employee activity electronically depends partially depends upon the company device being monitored. Exploration in this section of the legal perspectives regarding employer rights to electronically monitor employees will include company telephones, computers, vehicles, and facilities.

In the realm of telephone monitoring, federal law will allow employers to monitor business related calls that their employees are making as reflected under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 USC 2510 ("Employee Monitoring', 1993). This act also suggests that electronic monitoring of telephone conversations that are business related can be done so passively without notification to either party of the telephone call while the call is in progress. On the other hand, under the same federal law, an employer must cease to monitor any personal telephone calls that an employee is engaged in while at the place of employment.

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