Utilizing Your Business’s CCTV Properly
Installing surveillance cameras in your business can keep safe your employees and the business you’ve built. However, before the cameras go up, you need to make sure you know and understand what surveillance means and what you can and can’t do.
Lawful Employee Monitoring
There are many reasons why employers monitor employees with CCTV, and monitoring can be lawful if they include these reasons:
- Keep employees safe by preventing violence and theft
- Prevent pilfering, malingering, deliberate damage or any other misconduct
- Ensure that health and safety procedures are followed
- Improve and monitor productivity
- To comply with regulatory requirements, like in financial sectors
Employer/Employee Trust
Employment law says that employers must not act in a way that will damage the mutual trust and confidence with employees. If this does happen, an employee can claim constructive dismissal. This means that their employer has done something so fundamentally inconsistent with the law that the employee is entitled to resign and claim compensation as if they have been unfairly dismissed.
Data Protection Laws
Data protection laws and principles regulate how an employer is allowed to collect and process employees’ personal data. This data includes CCTV footage recorded of them. These laws and principles allow employees the right to know which data are held on them and the reasons they are being collected and processed. There are also limits on how long such data can be held.
Respect Employees’ Rights to Privacy
Employers, particularly in public sectors, need to respect employees’ rights to privacy by making sure their CCTV monitoring isn’t too intrusive. In order to avoid problems with laws, you should let employees know in advance unless you are using CCTV to detect a crime, catch, and prosecute those responsible, or to comply with regulatory requirements.
