Comply with data protection legislation

Monitoring employees

The Data Protection Act 1998 also applies to personal information processed during the monitoring of employees, as well as casual, contract and agency staff. The Information Commissioner has developed codes of best practice to help businesses comply with the Act.

Monitoring is defined as activities that set out to collect information about workers by keeping them under some sort of observation. This includes monitoring electronic communications, video and audio monitoring, covert monitoring, in-vehicle monitoring and monitoring using information from others.

The Information Commission's code of practice says that any adverse impact of monitoring on employees must be justified by the benefits to employers and others.

To establish whether there is such justification, data controllers can undertake an impact assessment which involves:

• identifying the purpose behind the monitoring
• identifying any adverse impact of the monitoring on the subjects of it
• considering alternatives to monitoring
• taking account of obligations that arise from monitoring such as setting up new rocesses to ensure records are secure

The monitoring code of practice emphasises that workers should be made aware of the nature, extent and reasons for monitoring, unless covert monitoring is justified. If you are monitoring employees to enforce your business' rules and standards, these should be set out in a policy that also refers to the nature and extent of any associated monitoring.

You should note that covert monitoring will rarely be justified, and you must be satisfied that there are clear grounds for suspecting criminal activity or equivalent malpractice. A reliable test to use would be whether the activities you wish to monitor are sufficiently serious to involve the police, although you would not actually have to involve them.

You must make sure that the individual or individuals responsible for monitoring in your business are aware of the Act and its implications. Keep to a minimum the number of workers who have access to personal information obtained through monitoring.

Download a quick guide to the Employment Practices Code from the Information Commissioner website (PDF).

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• The Information Commissioner
• The Data Protection Act
• The eight principles
• Notifying the Information Commissioner
• Exemptions from notifying the Information Commissioner
• Rights of access
• Monitoring employees
• Enforcement and penalties
• Bogus data protection agencies
• Here's how I complied with the Data Protection Act 1998

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