Colleagues Become Confidants in the Age of Coronavirus
Wall Street Journal: Sharona Hoffman, the Edgar A. Hahn Professor of Law and co-director of the Law-Medicine Center, said that employers can direct workers to keep an eye on colleagues without running afoul of the law—but that it’s easy to overstep. For example, if a boss tells a worker she knows a specific person is struggling with a mental illness and asks him to watch for signs, that could be a privacy violation. “Does it shift from being a support system to being a system where everybody’s talking about everybody?”. Hoffman said. “If you tell someone you’re feeling a little down today, you don’t know if they are going to run to HR with that.”