Employee Home Address/Phone List

Jalgie

Is there a potential liability to publishing on an intranet or other internal
resource, the employee home address/phone list?

Gillian

Could be. The information could be made public and create all sorts of difficulties. An attorney which we use has a story about this subject. His law firm published such a list a number of years ago. He suspects that the information in that list was the source of a serious stalking episode with an employee of their firm. Be careful.

Margaret Morford

Also on a more practical note, headhunters would love to get a hold of your employee list to raid your company for talent. They have been known to offer employees cash to aquire a copy of your list, particularly with home telephone numbers.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge

dhnyct

I would also be concerned about valid expectations regarding personal privacy issues. We publish contact lists of management staff for everyone, but only our management staff has access to employee information on the basis of "need to know". Some people have valid reasons for unlisted address/phone, so we do not publish personal info.

Even with this assurance, I currently have one employee who refuses to give me a home telephone number. Our employee handbook requires employees to advise us of any changes in certain info for emergency purposes.

jkendall

We had always given home addresses & phone lists of all employees. Then a disgruntled (fired) employee made harassing phone calls to current employees threatening that she knew where they lived...

Needless to say, we no longer pass out any sort of list to all staff. We do pass a list to manager of all employees phone numbers. (No home addresses)

Mike Maslanka

all this is true enough,but today we all must be connected 24/7 with each other if we are to service our clients and customers...a home address should not be distributed,but cell phones,emails,etc. should as well as home numbers...perhaps the distribution should be limited,but i see no way around it...mike maslanka

smarti

I'm not sure we all need to be connected 24/7 however, cell phones and e-mails are appropriate,home address'and home telephone is not without permission from the person. Particularly on the internet! You may be providing personal information that many of us keep off the internet. Possible liability should that information lead to harm. My advise - stay away from publishing personal information without written permission.

System

I would not recommend doing that. True story: A former employee came in to the establishment that I formally worked at for a couple of beers when he saw an attractive new employee, a cocktailer, walk by. He went around and asked about her and managed to get her phone number from a coworker who looked it up on the phone list. He then did a "reverse lookup" on the phone number, looked up her name in the phonebook and matched up the name to the number and got her address. He then went to her house and broke in. When she got home he raped and beat her nearly to death. She now has a seven-inch scar down her otherwise beautiful face. Since this happened, I don't release last names, phone numbers, or addresses to any fellow employees. If an employee wants a coworker to have their phone number or address they'll provide it to them themselves.

Down_the_Middle

I've wrestled with this repeatedly and even though this info is regarded as public information, I've always chosen to NOT post it . Would be intereted in hearing how others have addressed this.

Gar

You're asking for trouble. Forget it!!!!

Anita

Our company policy is NOT to give out home addresses and home phone numbers, except to the President and the CFO. If an employee wants to talk to another employee(who's not at work that day)I tell that employee that if they want I will call the employee at home and have them call back. That way it is the decision of that employee at home, whether they want to talk to the other employee or not.

When I first came to work here, they use to publish home addresses and phone numbers, and give to all the supervisors, but when people(an ex-employee) started harassing others,(they had taken the published list home that one of the supervisors posted on the wall), and the list was also copied and given to someone that was trying to unionize our company who started calling all the people at home and pestering them daily about unionizing, the President of the Company decided that we should stop publishing it. Most employees are happy that their personal information is not given out unless they do it.

AMW

I don't believe there is any liability. I'm not sure I recommend it though. That is private information that employees may not want other people to see. Our company does have the business phone numbers for all of our employees on the Intranet.

AMW

Gar

To AMW: Think about it this way. Your employer publishes and distributes among all employees a list containing your names, addresses and phone numbers. Many of these employees, including you, have unlisted phone numbers and addresses. Six months later an employee is fired for assaulting a co-worker. You had nothing to do with the matter but the assaulter erroneously believes you were a witness against him. He has the list. He comes to your home and exacts his revenge by assaulting you and your family. Now, do you still believe there is no liability vis-a-vis your employer? As I said earlier, you're asking for trouble with these lists. Forget about it!!!