Monitoring means of communication

General conditions for monitoring employees

When monitoring your employees’ email, Internet and telephone use, you must comply with the general conditions for monitoring employees. These always apply if you want to monitor your staff, regardless of what exactly it is about.

Guidelines for private use of email, Internet and telephone

You must inform your employees in advance what the rules are for the private use of email, Internet and business telephone during working hours. And that they may be monitored. It is advisable that you draw up internal guidelines about this, such as rules of conduct or a protocol.

Note: When drawing up guidelines, keep in mind that employees are entitled to a certain degree of privacy at work. As a good employer, you are obliged to respect this right to privacy.

Monitoring private use of email, Internet and telephone

If you do not set conditions for the use of email, Internet and telephone at work, you cannot completely prohibit private use of these means of communication during working hours. Your employees are entitled to a certain degree of privacy at work.

Naturally, they must have a sense of moderation. They must also take into account the content of their email, the websites they visit, the telephone numbers they call and the apps or text messages they send. For example, they are not allowed to view inappropriate or illegal content on the Internet.

General monitoring of email, Internet and telephone

You can randomly monitor whether prohibited email, Internet or telephone use is taking place, such as visiting websites with inappropriate or illegal content.

Before you start monitoring, you must determine the purpose for which the monitoring is necessary. How extensive the monitoring may be depends on the purpose and how you can monitor.

A purpose could be system and network security, protecting trade secrets or reducing costs and time loss.

Covert monitoring of email, Internet and telephone

If you suspect abuse by one or more employees, you may, under certain conditions, carry out a specific check on the use of email, Internet or telephone by these individual employees. You can often suffice with a short, targeted check if abuse is suspected.

This is regarded as covert monitoring, which means the employees concerned do not know in advance that you are carrying out a check. You must comply with the conditions for covert monitoring of employees.

Checking the emails of absent employees

If an employee is absent for a longer period of time, for example, due to illness or holiday, you, as an employer, may check this employee’s email. But you should keep in mind that your employees have the right to receive and send private messages from time to time.

You should therefore avoid the employee’s private email as much as possible when monitoring the email. For example, if the title of a message indicates the email is personal, you are not allowed to read that message.

Regulations for monitoring of emails of employees

It is advisable to draw up regulations to let your employees know that you may check their work email when they are on holiday or absent due to illness.

If your employees know that monitoring is possible, they can distinguish between their business email and private email if they wish. For example, by keeping their private email in a separate folder (with the title ‘Personal’) or by putting ‘personal’ in the title of the message for private emails.

Monitoring social media

You may have a legitimate interest in monitoring what is said about your organisation on social media. You may encounter statements from your employees. If you want to address an employee about a statement, first give this employee the opportunity to explain the information found.

Furthermore, you may only monitor public information on social media. You cannot force your employees to accept a connection, follow or friend request, or share the login codes of their account with you.

Guidelines for monitoring social media

You must let your employees know in advance that they may be monitored. It is advisable that you draw up internal guidelines about this.

Recording telephone calls

You may record telephone calls of your employees if necessary. For example, to improve telephone services in your call centre.

Informing employees about recording

Your employees have the right to know if their calls are being recorded. For example, you can emit an audio signal when the recording starts. You must explain in advance that such a signal indicates the start of a recording, and for what purpose you record the calls.

Informing your employees that you may record their calls just once, when they start employment, does not suffice. Your employees need to know if you record their calls. You must also inform the person your employee is calling (such as a customer) in advance that the call will be recorded and what you use the recordings for, such as for training purposes.

Covert recording of telephone calls

You are hardly ever allowed to covertly record telephone calls, i.e. without your employees and/or their calling partner knowing this. This is only allowed in exceptional situations:

• in the event of threats;
• in the event of bomb threats;
• if you suspect that an employee is doing something punishable, such as disclosing trade secrets.

You may not covertly record employees’ telephone calls to supervise, train or assess them.

When covertly recording telephone calls, you must comply with the conditions for covert monitoring of employees. In addition, you must provide sufficient safeguards, for example by:

• ensuring that only authorised persons can access the recordings;
• having the recordings automatically destroyed if it turns out that an employee has not done anything punishable;
• not retaining the recordings longer than necessary, i.e. until the incident has been dealt with.

Continuous recording of telephone calls

You may only record telephone calls continuously if this is necessary for your services, such as for telephone stock exchange orders. A recording is then necessary as proof that a contract has been concluded. In that case, you may only use the recordings as proof of the concluded contract.