BUS5PB Principles of Business Analytics - Case Studies Assignment Help

Case Study–Prevention better than litigation? Monitoring of employee computer use:

1. 1.  Is it ethical for organizations to monitor employees to detect access to pornography and then sack them if they have accessed it? Discuss. (6marks)

Court & Warmington (2004, pp. 17) conducted a survey for two years on marketing which indicates that the word “sex” was the most searched term on the Web. This study also added that the most searched words are “XXX”, “Playboy” and “nude’’ and also the fact that 70% of the traffic on the internet mostly occurred during office timings. According to Court precise cases of employees at major companies using corporate’s computers for sex-related purposes:

1. the Dow Chemical Company fired fifty and suspended two hundred employees for sending and saving pornography and inappropriate emails
2. The New York Times terminated more than twenty workers for sending violent emails in the office.

‘No expectation of privacy on company computer used at home’ (2002, pp. 35) reports a case of an insurance business senior executive who was given two corporation computers, one for office use and another for home. The company presented the executive to sign an agreement regarding the use of a computer which stated that he won’t visit any pornographic website or use the company in an unethical way. However, the insurance company fired the executive for disrespecting the corporation’s agreement. The researcher further reports that the executive appealed that he did not visit the website internationally but the website accidentally popped up on his computer. Hence, he sued the company for terminating him wrongfully. During the trial, the lawyer of the insurance company demands the judge to check the former employee’s laptop but the court didn’t approve this appeal. However, the court of appeals didn’t agree and his computer was searched and insurance companies’ lawyers provided the evidence that the website just didn’t pop up but they were visited. This shows that the right to private information is not given to the employees for the personal computer. The employee is given the freedom of his privacy in some companies in for the use of a personal computer but at workplaces, it is neglected. In my opinion it is unethical for the employers to check the computer of their employees as it is their own choice what they search or what they don’t. Employees should be at least provided with a right to privacy.

1. Considering your response to 1.1, present an Analytical solution that can avoid the ethical and privacy issues raised while helping the organization achieve what they want to. For your specific solution, discuss the ethical and privacy concerns that may arise and how they are dealt with. (6 marks

According to Yerby (2013, pp. 52), the companies should write and update policies that should then be cross-checked with the agreement that entails hard work by the team. The team should include human resources employees, lawyers and IT employees, these individuals will decide who is going to monitor, what actions are going to be checked, among employees who will be watched and what type of information would be checked. If any company has these types of policies, it should monitor the agreement yearly to cross-check if the agreement is according to the present methods. For corporate policies, they should be brief and easy to comprehend. The employers should specify in the policy that workers should not surf their private stuff on their work computers. The agreement should be specifically included that anything that is added on their work computers is going to be determined as well as they should also specify that their work emails would be checked alternatively.