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Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

Even when the company owns the computer and it is on company time?

"Company time" is steering you wrong there. When a worker's shift starts she doesn't become chattel property of the employer for the duration of her shift. Instead, she's doing work that the company paid for while retaining her own personhood.

My question is about German law. Company time is relevant because a contract requires compensation in order to be in effect (which you are paid for under company time).

It's a huge security risk to add a keylogger. It's also a deep invasion of privacy and compromises the ability of employees to conduct private one on ones, which are important for the mental well-being of a company of people. Imagine working from an office with a microphone attached to your desk that pipes everything you say to your boss, your boss's boss, all the way up the chain. People need to vent. Sometimes people need to waste time and shoot the shit about things unrelated to work. People need to be able to discuss things in private without fear. Otherwise the culture will descend into a constant state of paranoia and dysfunction.

It basically devolves the workplace into wargames where the employee focus becomes an "us vs them" battle stalemate with management re: tracking and obsessing over the KPIs vs how to beat the KPIs.

I worked in call center management and saw this play out real time. They made clients wear fitbits and hit metrics to qualify for the cheaper health insurance plan. Workers put the fitbits on drill bits and ran drills to whirl around the fitbit to beat the metrics. Then there was a mass group chat about how to beat the system. Then peoples personal cell phones had to be banned and kept in lockers outside the offices. And around and around and on and on it went. It was literally like Tom and Jerry and everyone was miserable and meanwhile the company wasn't doing well because nobody was focused on getting any high quality work done because of all the distractions and drama over the tracking.

Good working relationships has the capacity to boost productivity like nothing else. The cost of the unproductive time of a pleasant work-place conversation should be easily out-weighed by 'happy socially-engaged-in-the-workplace employee' pulling out all the stops to solve problems for their colleagues.

I don't believe this can be represented by KPIs, and therefore doesn't factor into (bad) managements' view of the world.

The company cannot even look at the employee's work emails unless there are already indications that the employee is acting in bad faith ("Anfangsverdacht").

That doesn’t seem true?

” According to the guidelines, if the use of the Internet and email services is only permitted for business purposes, the employer can check the Internet use of the employees randomly, to make sure that they use it for business purposes only.”

https://www.mondaq.com/germany/privacy-protection/496710/ger...

This is false for the general case. The employer always needs a reason, e.g. the employee appears to be browsing the internet the whole day instead of working. And even then, the work council has to be consulted.

The employer can look at work emails if it's the last resort (no other means to get the information), they have a reason (like if employee is sick and a customer emailed them directly with important contract data), a member of the work council is present, and it's been cleared by the GDPR person (whatever they're called in English).

Labor laws have been shaped by courts so it's quite confusing, even to Germans. Rulings are often decided by minuscule details that don't appear to be big but often are, so generalizing is hard.

I found this unproductive.

If a customer phone the support directly, are they going to hold the phone for hour waiting for approval? Only after the approval, the support can start reading the work email and decided the next step.

Co worker and manager need to aware of the work progress, just in case the employee is sick or something.

Employee should do their private work on their own devices.

The company can easily take measures to prevent situations like this by using a proper CRM solution. If the company didn't, it's its own fault. Flaws in internal processes don't legitimize surveillance.

It's also valuable to co-workers and managers to know if the employee might be engaging in behavior that could get them sick, or if they are looking for another job. So employers should really be able to monitor their employee's own devices, health records, and expenditures.

Does German law allow recording support helpdesk phone call?

What make email different from phone call?

The company can record phonecalls with customers as long as the customers agree, which is already being done under the disguise of "improving customer service". The company cannot record all phone calls an employee makes.

The company can simply require all customer communication to go through a proper CRM. This way there is no need to look into an employee's personal inbox.

Companies are never ever more important than human beings

Ok sure, but I was asking a technical question about German law, not morality.

Yes.

If something is a right, it shouldn't go away while "on company time" - even if they own the computer. You are not an object.

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