Emma Okonji
The Regional Manager, Middle East and Africa (MEA) at Zoho Corporation, Mr. Andrew Bourne, has advised business owners on the need to protect employee and consumer privacy in order to maintain good employee-customer relation and retain them.
According to him, “the business landscape is hurriedly re-orienting itself to provide the digital consumer a safe space where their data is protected round the clock.”
“Meanwhile, there’s another important stakeholder whose privacy equally matters. Employees have just as much right to privacy in the workplace,” Bourne said, adding that recent trends like remote working and hybrid models have heightened the importance of employee privacy in an organisation.
With little to no time to vet third-party vendors, organisations had to purchase and implement technology quickly or use free applications without weighing vulnerabilities. But this hasty transition was not without its risks, especially for employees. For instance, the steep rise in user base for video conferencing tools caught the hackers’ attention and live meetings were invaded in some cases. Moreover, audio/video calls while working from home means that varied details of employees’ personal lives are archived in vendors’ data records, at risk of being compromised unless the vendor has a stringent data protection program, Bourne said.
According to him, many companies introducing remote monitoring software when their employees began working from home also raised a lot of privacy concerns.
He cited Gartner, which stated that more than one out of four companies purchased technology during the pandemic to passively track and monitor their employees.
Commenting on transparency at work, Bourne said employers have been long studying workplace patterns, engagement survey responses, and team dynamics to foster a productive work environment. “Employees are usually willing to work together with their employer on this, provided the data gathered directly serves an internal business goal as well as the latter informs beforehand about what the data will be used for, how it will be stored, and who will have access to it. The same goes with employee monitoring.
“A 2018 Gartner study reported that more than 50 per cent of the respondents were comfortable with monitoring on grounds of valid reasons from the employer.”
He said to put things in perspective, employees willingly trust employers to keep their data safe and use it responsibly. But this trust is broken when employers keep employees in the dark about what purpose their data serves or cross a line with tracking by going to lengths like uninformed surveillance or camera monitoring, he said. He added tha5 the moment employees feel their employer is invading their privacy, it will reflect in the organisation’s attrition rate.
Businesses may also be placing themselves on shaky legal ground when it comes to employee privacy. In terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), employers have to make employees aware that their productivity and performance is being monitored and should provide reasons for doing so, Bourne advised.
