As an employer, no matter how much you want to monitor your employees, you need to understand their rights according to California Laws to avoid litigation. While these rights are long and complex, they have been summarized below.

Video Monitoring

You are allowed to install surveillance cameras in several locations in your office premises but you must notify your employees of where the cameras are. It is believed that you should install them only in areas where work is being performed and not in areas like the restrooms or the dining room. And if you need the footage of any of your employees for anything, you must seek his or her express consent before going ahead with whatever you want to do.

It is advisable to get a written and signed consent as a disgruntled employee may deny giving you his consent later and even sue you for the violation of his privacy rights.

Usernames and Passwords

You don’t have the right to ask your employee for his username or password to access his workstation. Even if your IT team needs to work on an employee’s workstation, they can access it through the administrator’s password. When your employee is logging on, you need to step away from him, otherwise you may be accused of looking over his shoulder to get his login details.

Phone Calls

When any official phone call is being monitored, you must alert both parties that the call is being monitored. It is also important to remember that monitoring and recording are two different things. A lot of employers believe that notifying employees that their calls are monitored suffices for notification for call recording. This is wrong. Monitoring may mean that someone else is listening. If the calls will be recorded, you must also state that too.

GPS Tracking

This is a pretty new one and its limit is yet to be fully defined. However, employers only have the right to track company’s properties like cars and laptops. This is accepted for the safety of the properties. You should never track any employee that is not in possession of any company’s property. It means you are already encroaching on the employee’s privacy rights.

Drug Testing

You may subject your employees to drug test before hiring them and you can also subject them to post-employment drug test when any issue that warrants it occurs. Aside the two scenarios, you should never subject your employees to drug test. In addition, if drug test is part of your screening process, you must notify applicants beforehand.

Workstation Monitoring

Although there are several applications that can be used to monitor your employees’ activities on their workstation, you must let them know. Never assume that they will never know. They may find out. A glitch may occur and expose you. Don’t risk litigation.

Conclusively, this article has outlined and simplified the most important clauses in California laws on workplace privacy and employee monitoring. Adhering to them is not an option but a necessity.

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The first necessary element of understanding the phenomena of California’s laws related to medical privacy in the workplace is to define its basic element – medical records. These records that are related to a person’s medical history are made when the same person receives some kind of treatment from a health professional. These can include anyone from a physician or nurse, to a chiropractor or a psychiatrist. The same documents can cover, aside from the actual medical history, things like lifestyle choices like smoking or participating in high-risk activities like extreme sports, but also family medical history.

It is not rare that these include lab results, prescribed medications and results of a medical procedure that the same person has received. Any and all of these represent implications related to privacy for any employee if there is a chance the employer is accessing this information for some reason. If the same does occur, the law in the US state of California is triggered and here the key points of how this takes place.

Can Medical Records be Kept Private in the Workplace?

The law in California allows the employer to access medical information about their employee but it has to be related to a legitimate business reason. The information can be volunteered like in the case of sick leave or it can be requested for things like forms used for workers compensation claims. In any case, the information can be attained by the employer, but it both has to be related to the business and it has to be kept private inside of the same organization. This means that only those relevant to the case of the same individual can access this information.

Demanding Medical Test for Hiring a Person

Thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, employers cannot ask for medical tests as a basis of getting a job. This means that tests cannot be asked for as a requirement for employment. The main reason why this clause exists in the problem of medical privacy in the workplace is the protection of employees from any kind of employee screening for disabilities or other similar issues. Additionally, the same act forbids anyone from demanding their employees to take a medical test as a way of avoiding them losing their job.

HIPAA and its Role in Medical Privacy

The federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, represents a standard that is valid nationwide and which regulates the problem of privacy of health information. In other words, it shows the employers how medical records are both disclosed and used. It states that employers have to give notice when dealing with written privacy procedures, restrict the use of this information inside of their organization and finally, it asks for the appointment of a dedicated privacy officer and the training of their staff on this issue.

With this information, anyone will be a lot more suited to understand any relevant issue related to medical privacy in the workplace. At the same time, this knowledge will allow them to better prepare themselves and protect their personal information in the same environment.

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