Staff surveillance & holiday pay
“Can I read my employee’s personal emails if they come through his work account?”
Yes and no. You have to find the right balance between checking whether he’s using his work email account to perform his role and his right to privacy.
You can only check emails if you tell your employees in advance that your business monitors them. In any case, it’s likely that reading the email contents will breach his right to privacy.
But it’s usually enough to know if he’s sending and receiving personal messages by checking the time, date and address of the emails.
“My employee overused her holidays and left the business. What can I do?”
You have no legal right to deduct money from staff who overtake their holidays, so it depends on your ex-employee’s contract.
If the contract has a clause in it stating you can deduct money for overtaken holiday, you can take it from her final salary payment.
If you have already paid her, send her letter stating the amount she must repay and how she should pay it. But it’s more likely you’ll only enforce repayment through the courts.
“Can I use CCTV to keep an eye on my team’s performance?”
You can use CCTV monitoring to ensure employees are performing their work, but you must make them aware in advance.
A good way to do it is by including a CCTV monitoring policy in your company handbook and giving it to new joiners. Also, keep the policy in an accessible location like the company intranet and put CCTV warning signs up around the workplace.
Never use CCTV to monitor employees in areas where they would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, like in toilets or in changing rooms.