Our first TCO asks us to consider the deontological ethical approach given certa

Question

Our first TCO asks us to consider the deontological ethical approach given certain ethical dilemmas that may arise in the professional world. You may want to review this week's lecture as you think about the following topic for discussion. Consider a situation in which a company is planning to implement a surveillance policy to monitor its employees. What kinds of ethical duties do you think this company has that would be involved in this decision? You may talk about duties to its shareholders, customers, employees, and others. Why do these duties exist? How should they impact the decisions made in this context?

Explanation / Answer

Surveillance policy to monitor its employees /Monitoring employees – Why ?- Reasons Why employer Should Monitor Employees at Work

There are mostly commercial reasons for employers and have expectation from their employees will work efficiently and will utilize resources of company and the working time for assigned work only. Employers want to monitor quality utilization of working time along with quality work and employees’ performance, work discipline at work place and right use of their property.

Scenario :Monitoring Employee Productivity/ Ethical issues faced

Incivility at workplace

It is kind of abuse or rudeness at work place. It doesn’t involve physical violence or physical harassment only, but it is lack of respect for other employees. It is culture in organization for individuals who are interacting, working together, to behave in a civil way. It is also important for employees to treat their customers and other external parties interacting with an organization with respecting manner and politely.

following are the recipients of uncivil behaviour of employee

Increased job stress and dissatisfaction among employees.

• decrease creativity.

• Disruption in relationships at work place

• Low commitment to work in the organization.

• Higher turnover of employees

When employees in team perceive that they are being mistreated by manager. This attitude may impact on co-workers and efficiency of workers. This leads employee dissatisfaction and increased absenteeism. There could be negative consequences for the person like dissatisfaction and low performance

Anticipate needing of surveillance policy to monitor employees

Maintain Confidentiality – Prevent leakage of information out of firm

Many firms have been taking care of their employee’s Internet usage in order to prevent transformation of confidential files, documents or information from being leaked to other source. This is especially applicable in terms of sensitive financial fields and data which can be leaked and this may resulting costing and loss of business in millions of dollars.

Culture of Professionalism

Employers’ monitoring at work place may create culture of professionalism and focused by cutting down various Internet activity at work may help to watch on employees chatting with each other.

Prevent wasting of Time and lose of attention

Employers prevent employees from surfing inappropriate websites, video or entertainment websites, trading stocks, gaming sites which consume lot time and attention while on job.

Virus Protection and misbehaviour downloading

The internet can be sometime dangerous source of virus or pirated music and videos or other illegal activity. Installing firewalls and blocks on certain websites prevent the transmission of viruses in LAN network of company computers. Furthermore employer can monitor emails to prevent an employee opening a suspicious or malicious emails.

Circumstances to know employee performance cross over the line - Action by a supervisor acceptable when employees are notified ahead of time

Workplace dishonesty

A company may feel of employee dishonesty like theft of company

Property, information or fraud like passing information to competitors. In order to prevent such incidents, supervisor may use some techniques like CCTV, network monitoring, email and phone recording, video surveillance and telephone monitoring. Supervisor should ensure that whether the actions they want to take are reasonable in line with business purposes and if these actions are against the privacy expectations of the employees or not.

Violence at workplace

No employer wants to have violence in its work-place, but some time some causes create work place violence which may disturbing life. These kind of incidents of employee violence cannot be predicted but companies have

Safety norms for potential threats to the health and for warning sign for other employees.

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