**Associate Acknowledgement
Call Monitoring/Recording
I understand that telephone lines are for business use only. I have been advised that any conversations on any company telephone line may be monitored and/or recorded for various reasons. I understand this company procedure, agree to observe it, and consent to it.**
Should I run this by a lawyer?
May my consent to a form like this be a condition of employment?
Are there laws related to workplace performance monitoring I could peruse?
It might be useful if you mentioned the state where you work.
No. It would be a waste of time and possibly money.
Yes.
Yes, but, unless they monitor your phone usage w/o telling you, I’d doubt there’s anything you can do about it.
You’re using their resources. Play by their rules.
At the hospital where I work, I had to sign a similar form. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten the job. Same thing applies to internet use. My supervisor can pull phone or internet logs anytime for any reason. I haven’t given them reason to do so (that I’m aware of), but it has been done and people have been fired for improper resource usage.
According to this, what they’re requiring you to sign is perfectly legal in California. The state laws might differ in your jurisdiction, but I’m fairly sure that California has the some of the most liberal privacy laws in the US.
I have a phone here on my desk that I’ve used maybe five times in the three months I’ve worked here.
Sign the form, then only use your cellphone. They can’t record that.
True enough, but some employers require you to use your office phone when conducting business.
For these and other obvious reasons, never use your company phone or internet connection for personal matters. (Barring the occasional family emergency.)
This site seems to present the facts pretty clearly.
http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs7-work.htm
IANAL, but I am an HR Person. As the site explains, employers are generally advised that if they are monitoring a call and it turns out to be personal, they can discipline for personal use of equipment, but should not listen to the contents of the call beyond the basics of knowing it’s not business. If you’re really concerned that this might not be handled professionally at your employer, you could ask HR to remind managers of this.
I don’t have any genuine concerns about this.
I was just curious as to what the state of legislation and case law was on this matter. I imagined I’d have knowledgeable persons chime in shortly after I posted this… and it appears I was right.
Thanks everybody.
For the record, my boss will monitor ONLY calls that come in on the company’s 800 support number I answer, so I don’t particularly care.
And I use my cell phone for my personal calls… on my breaks.
No problem there.
It’s one thing if the workplace monitoring is condition of employment prior to your accepting the job. But if you’re already working there, and the company institutes the monitoring, can you refuse to agree to it?
Sure. But they’ll probably fire you. They don’t need a reason to do that.
You can refuse to agree to it, sure, but the company will just go ahead and monitor your communications anyway. Everything I’ve ever known about this issue is in line with what has already been said: It’s their business, so they can do what they want. I think the only legitimate gripe an employee might have would be over covert survaillance, like hidden cameras or microphones.
So what would be the reason for this form I was presented with?
Then there are two good business reasons for monitoring calls -
First of, your employer is paying for the phones and the 800 service. Fair 'nuff?
Second, is for ongoing training and maintaining quality of customer service. We use a product called “Witness” here for this purpose. The phone bankers don’t know when they’re being monitored, so it helps keep them on their best behavior with customers. It also provides a way to “mentor” new agents - after a call, the manager can say “You did this and this well, but you forgot to tell them about such and such.” As a corralary, I’d expect callers to the 800 line are getting a “this call may be monitored or recorded” message.
To prevent you from claiming you were damaged by surreptitious monitoring, probably. When you sign the form you acknowledge that it takes place as a normal part of conducting business, and therefore can’t claim later that surreptitious monitoring contributed to a hostile or stressful work environment, or that they used information collected by such monitoring against you.
My company monitors Internet use, and presumably phone usage as well, but makes some allowances for personal use. I read, or post to, the Dope just about every day and I’ve been here almost seven years with no complaints. As long as one’s work gets done they don’t seem to care. Sometimes I’ve even gotten answers to work related questions here. I never heard of a place that had an absolute ban on personal phone or Internet use.
just a question in relation, and not a hijack:
in general, does a company, especially with a phone bank, have to tell you that they will/may monitor calls? Or, can they just do it without asking? Was the OP’s situation just a courtesy form, or a legal obligation?
I know it’s not directly relevant, but it some countries it’s explicitly permitted in law. From some research I did a few years ago looking at privacy in the UK:
[quote]
…provisions have been expanded upon by the Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations (October 2000) (the Regulations). The Regulations allow interception of certain types of business communications on their private networks, provided that employers have made “all reasonable efforts” to inform both the sender and receiver of the interception. The question of what constitutes reasonable efforts has however been left open.
Broadly, interceptions for the following purposes may be acceptable:
[ul][li]monitoring or keeping a record of communications in order to:[/li]- establish facts;
Recently read that CA just passed a law making the information in a cars computer is the property of the cars owner. Many new cars have a device like a flight data recorder in airplanes. The info in that device has been used by authorities against the vehicle’s owners/drivers
It is basically a notification of their intent, you cannot agree to it or not. You are on notice that they will do this. The form is to acknowledge you were told such.