Is Your Company Using Employee Data Ethically?
Potter Stewart, justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, once said, “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is right to do.” Associate Justice Stewart probably didn’t know how new data technologies would soon begin to blur those boundaries.
With the emergence of new information technologies, corporations can now amass and analyze unprecedented volumes of unstructured data — the data created by humans, such as the text contained in company documents, email, instant messaging, and social media. Collecting this data was originally driven by the obligation to produce evidence for litigation, to preserve business records, and to respond to regulators’ demands for information, but it has now dawned on corporations that all of that data can open up new vistas of management capabilities, such as visualizing employee interactions, mapping domain expertise, replaying past events, tracking employee sentiment, and providing insights into all human activity across the organization.
These capabilities are creating much excitement, angst, and debate. While the benefits are clearly far-reaching and potentially game changing, there are ethical questions to consider. When companies collect all the data their employees generate, there’s always the risk that employee privacy will be sacrificed for profit.
Consider the following ways that companies are using employee data:
Who knows whom? Who knows what? Companies use employee data to outline a network of relationships among employees, customers, vendors, and others, identifying subject matter experts. For sales and business development, this is an invaluable tool. A sales manager of a major services corporation, for example, may want to know which employees have the strongest relationships with executives at a client prior to visiting them and who best understands the subject of the meeting. But ethical conflicts can arise, say when the analysis identifies sensitive personal relationships that perhaps should not have existed on corporate servers in the first place.
Which employees are likely to quit? While it’s not an uncommon request to identify employees who are flight risks within an organization, the breadth and depth of such analysis may leave employees with a disquieting sense of being under surveillance. There is a risk, too, that managers may jump to easy conclusions about the results instead of unearthing the real issues, for instance assuming a distracted employee is disengaged when actually they’re going through problems at home.
Instant replay button for escalated incidents. During escalated incidents, timely and complete data can be the best defense against a surprise event, such as an internal investigation regarding an accusation of inappropriate behavior between an executive and a subordinate. Today’s technology can gather all relevant information on the matter and present a complete analysis so that management can respond effectively and in a timely way.
