Post-Employment Monitoring Isn’t An Option – You Have To Do It! by Jerry Thurber

What – isn’t it an invasion of privacy? Aren’t there all sorts of legal issues surrounding post-employment monitoring? Isn’t monitoring a dirty word? We don’t think it is our “corporate culture” to do any sort of monitoring of our employees.

These are the types of discussions and arguments I hear a lot when I speak or write about how this trend is growing and how new data sources are making it easier AND more relevant to track certain types of high risk behavior. One argument I counter with is this: Isn’t it true that we as HR professionals try and encourage that if one of our employees is a victim of harassment or of theft by another employee, for example, that they report this behavior? In fact, don’t we argue that there is risk to our companies if we don’t act on threats to the safety and wellbeing of our employees and customers? Monitoring risky behavior such as criminal activity or the posting of hate messages in social media is no different. If an employee came to you and said they suspected a fellow employee of stealing something from their office, wouldn’t we investigate and act accordingly? If an employee came to you and told you that they overheard that one of the employees in the office was arrested last weekend for domestic violence and they were afraid of the person’s temper – wouldn’t you investigate?

The story is no different and the situation should not be handled differently if you learn of risky activity from an effective post-employment monitoring program.  If you discover that a person was arrested two days ago, you would investigate this arrest and act in the best interests of the employees, the company and the customers. If this meant you had to suspend that employee or re-assign them until the facts were better known, you would do that. Indeed – as companies like Sterling Infosystems build effective tools to help you implement employee monitoring – it will become more likely that a court could find you negligent if you failed to use these tools and, as a result, could have avoided a bad situation with employees or customers.

You should consider a post-employment risk management program that includes monitoring. Sterling Infosystems can show you how.