It is almost necessary for anyone managing a business or office that you know your employees are doing their job. It is especially important to know what they are using your company’s equipment and computers for in the work place and they are not playing nor do other inefficient, non-work related tasks. While there is plenty of software available on the market to track what is happening on each of the computers available on your network, there is one question that needs an answer before you install it. Is it legal?

The question on whether or not you are allowed to “spy” on your employees in the office comes down to the legality of it. In some cases it is legal, and in other cases, using monitoring software to view what your employees are doing on the job can be illegal. In America, some states say this is perfectly ok. However, many actually may take legal action against employers viewing its employee’s activities. Local county or city rules may even come into play.

Certainly, anything happening inside the office can, and should be monitored. This should be done to track reliability, use of time, and efficiency of your employees, if not for anything else. If your workers in the office are using your computers, your equipments, your company’s software and servers, then it is legal to know every little exchange of information that happens within the office walls.

Say your office uses an office-wide IM service. Most of these IM services already have a built in monitoring system for your server that will catch any message going between the computers in your office. Reading these would be legal. However, if an employee logs on to MSN or AIM, you may have another problem. Because the messages are being sent outside of your office, you could be infringing on employee privacy laws if you monitor and review these messages.

Monitoring your employee’s activities usually requires actions to confirm with the employee that you are doing so. While in some cases this may not be legally necessary, and employer must look into the ethics of monitoring their employee’s computer activities. Some messages sent across your server may be quite private, and if an employee is not aware of this (despite the fact that they shouldn’t be chatting freely while on the clock), they could get quite upset.

To truly know if it is legal to monitor your employees’ internet and computer usage, check your local privacy laws for more information.