I first became interested in employee privacy and monitoring many many years ago. A client received a complaint from an employee who had just discovered that his brief interlude having sex with a colleague in the stockroom had been caught on the camera placed there to cut down on theft. I forget the precise gist of his complaint – that had he known he was on film, he would have gone about things differently in some respect, I suppose – but it was clear to me even then that the area was fraught with danger for the unwary employer.
And that was in the UK’s relatively liberal data privacy/monitoring jurisdiction. Just imagine the pitfalls applicable in some of the world’s less benign legal systems, where for cultural or historic reasons employee privacy is very jealously guarded and the sanctions for unwarranted intrusion or inappropriate monitoring very material indeed. Eye-watering fines and custodial sentences feature high up on the menu in France, for example.
If your remit in Legal, Compliance or HR reaches overseas into those jurisdictions, then you need imagine no more. Our Global Edge employment reference tool has now been supplemented by new international reports and information on a suite of employee privacy topics: data protection; monitoring, surveillance and screening; employee activities outside work; drug and alcohol testing; and rights to search.
That means that within just a few clicks and less than a minute, you can pull up the latest law and practice on these vexed areas in any or all of the 30 different jurisdictions around the world which are featured in Global Edge. If you are trying (for example) to harmonise your employee data retention programme across all your countries, or to do a sense-check on a grievance or local legal or HR advice in just one, then you will find concise and practical do’s and don’ts, regularly updated and collated by topic or by country as you prefer. In addition, the timing and significance of forthcoming legal changes are clearly heralded a good time in advance by Global Edge’s horizon-scanning feature.
Whether you are new to Global Edge or already a convert, please take a look at this short video on these new additions to it
http://www.globaledge.legal/Content/ge_demo/employee_privacy.html. If you think that Global Edge could keep you out of the Bastille, or even just take a little weight off your mind from the compliance perspective in the complex and high-stakes international employee privacy field, please contact Olivia Mardon on 0207 655 1034, email: olivia.mardon@squirepb.com.
