With flexible working on the rise and the line between work and leisure becoming increasingly blurred, where does company policy conflict with personal privacy?
As colleagues begin to use a mixture of their own devices and company-owned software for both personal and professional use, employee communications must undergo a similar change to adapt to how people work.
Take Bogdan Bărbulescu, who was part of a decade-long court case which questioned where the boundaries between privacy and policy.
In 2007, the Romanian engineer was fired from his job at a sales company, after he was found to be using his work-provided Yahoo Messenger account to have conversations with his brother and intimate chats with his fiancé.
Mr Bărbulescu was fully aware that his employer’s policies banned personal use of office resources. Despite this, he argued that his employer had infringed his right to privacy by keeping a log of, and actively monitoring his Yahoo Messenger activity.
After an almost decade-long court case, in which Mr Bărbulescu initially lost his case, judges from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights overturned the original verdict.
They concluded that the monitoring of the messages was a breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right of respect for privacy, family life and private correspondence.
The precedent set by this case is an interesting one, especially in light of the rise of ‘shadow comms’ in the workplace. WhatsApp, Slack and Facebook Messenger are seeing increasing use in the workplace in an unofficial capacity, and with this new precedent the line between work and personal life will be more blurred than ever.
The hard-line approach of strict communications or social media policies are now effectively dead, and a new era of work/life platforms has been ushered in.
Employers are increasingly enacting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, but what about Bring Your Own Software (BYOS) policies that show employees how to strike a balance between using Slack for work and to organise a night out?
In internal communications, we’re guilty of slapping a ‘digital’ tag on everything, ignoring (or not understanding) how software and hardware integrate, but also have their own independent limitations. BYOD is another example of this, where we think of mobile devices as ‘digital’ but ignore the thing that actually makes them powerful – software.
Employers need to think very carefully about how they enable their workforce to utilise the very best instant messaging apps, in a way that’s more likely to win them an award for empowerment, rather than make people fearful that their employer is becoming big brother.
