Monitoring in the post lockdown office
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How much should employers know about their workers as people head back to the office? Companies have a duty of care to make sure their workers are safe, but how much monitoring is reasonable? Is this the end of privacy at work? Manuela Saragosa hears from Dutch privacy and employment lawyer Philip Nabben, as well as Sam Naficy the CEO of Prodoscore which makes software that monitors employee productivity, and Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London.
(Image: A security guard checks the temperature of an employee inside an office building in Shanghai. Credit: Getty Images).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Salagossa, and this is Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:06.2 | Coming up, welcome back to your post-lockdown workplace. |
| 0:10.3 | Look, I think the concept of privacy has been shattered. |
| 0:14.5 | And this is the new evolution of employment, of work life, that people are watching what we do. |
| 0:21.6 | So has the coronavirus sounded the death knell for privacy at work. |
| 0:25.6 | It is safe to say that employers could know a lot about their employees, |
| 0:31.6 | including whether they are sharing any symptoms of unwellness with others. |
| 0:38.3 | The tricky balancing act between protecting an employee's health and privacy. |
| 0:43.1 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:49.2 | Here's something that'll sound familiar to millions of people venturing back into their offices this week. |
| 0:56.1 | I'm coming into work at the BBC and things have changed quite a bit since before the lockdown. |
| 1:01.6 | There are two channels these days, one which will let me walk straight in with the usual security |
| 1:06.6 | and one which asks if I'd like to have my temperature measured because everyone knows if you have a temperature, you may have the coronavirus. |
| 1:14.2 | So being the sort of employee who cares about my colleagues, |
| 1:17.3 | I'm going to go through the temperature checking channel. |
| 1:21.0 | I just hope that my readings within the acceptable boundary. |
| 1:25.8 | I'm standing on the designated patch on the ground. I'm looking at the |
| 1:30.4 | thermal camera and there's a screen a few metres away and I'm getting a reading of 36.7 which |
| 1:39.4 | means thankfully I'm well within the acceptable boundaries. |
| 1:44.9 | The BBC's Elizabeth Hotson there, doing her bit to keep colleagues safe. |
| 1:49.8 | To many, those kind of temperature checks as you come into a public building |
| 1:53.1 | will seem about the least that any employer can do to ensure a safe and healthy workplace. |
... |
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