Poland: Changes required to your Work Regulations or Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), if you want to monitor your employees

Published

Jun 13 2018

Written By

I work as a Counsel in our Employment team in Warsaw. I am an expert in individual and collective law with a particular interest in trade union relations and employee benefit schemes.

Karolina Stawicka

Partner
Poland

As a partner and Head of our Employment team in Warsaw, I am an experienced employment law expert specialised in litigation, including civil and criminal cases involving corruption and trade secrets.

As of 25 May 2018, every employer in Poland that applies any form of employee monitoring must adjust their internal regulations.

Depending on the size of your organisation and the form of employee monitoring the scope of adjustment and actual monitoring options may differ. However, each time the purpose, scope and form of monitoring requires detailed regulations, taking into account the new statutory restrictions.

As a result, many employers will have to abandon CCTV monitoring for the purposes of time recording and employee performance reviews.

Even in the case of small structures without Work Regulations, or CBAs, employers must inform employees about monitoring in the workplace by way of a formal announcement.

Employees should be informed about the monitoring no later than two weeks before it is introduced and during the onboarding procedures of each newcomer.

Action must be taken now, especially if there are Work Regulations or CBA at your workplace! Otherwise the employer will not be able to use recordings from the monitoring when making HR decisions regardless of the employees incompliance. Further, failing to do so the employer may face administrative sanctions.