Home Office? No problem
The wave of the COVID-19 disease was and is a difficult test for the population. In business, if the nature of the work allowed it, the possibility of a home-office as a safe form of work was brought to a large extent. We don't want to discuss this difficult test any more for this blog, but in many cases during this difficult situation, companies found out that it is possible for employees to work from home to a greater extent.
Home Office can represent a possible risk for the manager. The fact remains that questions arise. Will the person do as well as if he were in the company? Will he not engage in private activities during his work? Will I be able to trust him that his performance is backed by as many hours of work as he claims? And more and more questions.
Mango has come up with a solution to these questions. How? It developed an application MANGO DEKTOPP APP (MDA) - application for monitoring work on the computer. It is an application that, when the user installs it on his PC, it will completely record the work on his computer and will automatically send it to Manga in the activity section. Now it is clear to us that questions are running through your head whether it is legal at all. Answer: yes, it is. Let's make it a little more specific.
Monitoring an employee's work on a computer is legal, but must comply with privacy and labor laws. In Slovakia, this monitoring is regulated mainly in Labor Code and the Personal Data Protection Act, which implements the GDPR (EU Regulation 2016/679 on the protection of natural persons in the processing of personal data). Together, these laws establish the conditions under which employees can be monitored.
Key laws and rules:
Labor Code (Act No. 311/2002 Coll.):
- In § 13 of the Labor Code stipulates that the employer is obliged to respect the dignity and privacy of employees and cannot interfere with their rights more than is necessary.
- The Labor Code directly states that the employer can monitor employees only if it is necessary to protect the legitimate interests of the employer, and employees must be informed about the monitoring.
Personal Data Protection Act (Act No. 18/2018 Coll.) and GDPR:
- GDPR and the related Personal Data Protection Act require that employees be informed about the purpose, scope and method of monitoring.
- Monitoring is permissible only when the employer has a legitimate interest, for example in the protection of property or efficient use of working time. However, this interest must be balanced with the employee's right to privacy.
- The employer must keep only those data that are necessary and must ensure that they are processed securely.
GDPR Regulation:
- GDPR requires that employers have a data processing process in place and that employees know how and why their personal data is processed.
- Personal data obtained through monitoring must be processed only for the specified purpose and must not be used beyond this purpose.
We described the situation in Slovakia above. If a company wants to implement this monitoring in another country, we recommend that you find out what the laws of that country say.
If a monitoring system is planned to be implemented, the employer should prepare an internal guideline and inform the employees in writing about all aspects of the monitoring so that the process is legal.
We may have scared you a little above, but on the contrary, the law says that it is fine, only the employee should know about it, which Mango respects and the employee must verify the activities recorded by the program.
It is very similar to if an employee wrote down what he worked on during the day and sent you a report of what he did at the end of the working day. This is the same thing. MDA records the work, which is first displayed only to the employee, who must verify this work so that the superior can see it, and then you can see what the employee did during the day.
When the application is installed on the employee's computer, it runs in the background all the time and does not interfere with the employee's work performance. As we mentioned above, all the activities that the employee performs on the monitored computer are uploaded to Mango, where they are displayed with the MDA flag in the main menu in the activities section. These activities are of course subject to verification, but if the employee wants all activities to be automatically verified, he can set it. If I use the computer only for business purposes, it is possible that I am more comfortable setting up automatic verification, and thus everything I do during the day is transferred to Manga activities and automatically verified. But if I also use the computer for private purposes, it goes without saying that I don't want everything to be seen in Mango. Then it is good to set the activities to be subject to verification. This means that they will only appear in Mango when I, as the user, confirm them. You can find all the necessary information about MDA at the link
below.
SOMETHING TO CONCLUDE - a word from the author
Within this blog, as an author, I would like to say a final word. I work for the marketing department at crmango, s.r.o. I do my work mostly from home and the MDA application monitors my computer every day. As an employee of the company, I consider this method transparent for both parties. For me, home-office is a very welcome way of working, which represents many advantages for me personally. In return, for the company through MDA, it is a safe solution from the point of view of measuring my work performance and generally having an idea of what and when I do during the day. This system brings benefits for both the company and the employee. It is necessary for both parties to agree on the rules, on security, so that both parties are sufficiently informed as stated in the law above, and then MDA is a smart helper for almost every company.
