Employee monitoring laws in Poland
Yes, and Poland is one of the few countries that writes the procedure into the Labour Code itself: put the monitoring in your work regulations, tell staff at least two weeks before it starts, and tell each new joiner before giving them access.
Who has to agree before you start
The fact that decides the timeline, and the one that differs most between countries.
Staff must be told, in a prescribed way
There is no consent right for a representative body, but the Labour Code prescribes the form and timing of information: the purposes, scope and manner of monitoring go into the work regulations, a collective agreement or an announcement, and employees must be informed no later than two weeks before monitoring begins.
No representative body has to agree, but the notice has a required form and timing — Poland's two weeks, New York's written notice on hiring, the ICO's expectation of genuine transparency. These rollouts move fastest, and the notice is the thing most often got wrong.
GDPR (RODO) with the Polish implementing act, plus Labour Code articles that set out a specific procedure for workplace monitoring, supervised by the UODO.
The law that applies in Poland
Named so you can check us, and so your own counsel has somewhere to start.
| Instrument | What it requires |
|---|---|
| Kodeks pracy art. 22² | Sets the regime for video monitoring: permitted purposes, a requirement to record the purposes, scope and manner in the work regulations or collective agreement, information to employees two weeks before launch, and marking of the monitored area. |
| Kodeks pracy art. 22³ | Extends that regime to monitoring of work email, and applies the same procedural provisions to other forms of monitoring where they are necessary for the permitted purposes — which is the hook that brings activity-monitoring software into the Labour Code procedure rather than leaving it to the GDPR alone. |
| GDPR Art. 6(1)(f) | Supplies the lawful basis for monitoring not specifically mandated by law, requiring a documented legitimate-interests assessment; consent is not regarded as freely given in employment. |
| GDPR Art. 35 | A DPIA is expected for systematic monitoring of employees; UODO's list of processing requiring one covers monitoring of employee activity. |
How a rollout is done here
- Write the purposes, scope and manner of monitoring into the work regulations (regulamin pracy) — or into a collective agreement, or an announcement where no work regulations exist.
- Inform employees at the latest two weeks before monitoring begins. Deploying inside that window means operating without the basis the Labour Code sets up.
- Give each new employee the written information before granting access to the monitored systems.
- Document the legitimate-interests assessment and run a DPIA for systematic monitoring.
- Keep the scope inside what the stated purposes require; the Labour Code limits monitoring to what is necessary for them.
What gets a rollout refused
- Starting monitoring before the two-week period has run. The requirement is procedural and easy to satisfy, which makes failing it an unforced error.
- Updating the software's capture scope without updating the work regulations.
- Missing the new-joiner step, which is separate from the workforce-wide announcement.
- Monitoring areas the Labour Code puts off limits for video — such as sanitary facilities, cloakrooms and union premises — and assuming analogous limits do not inform how other monitoring is judged.
Monitoring staff in Poland — questions
Does the Labour Code cover activity-monitoring software, or only CCTV and email?
Art. 22² addresses video and art. 22³ addresses work email, and the Labour Code applies the same procedural provisions to other forms of monitoring necessary for the permitted purposes. Polish practice is therefore to run activity monitoring through the same procedure: work regulations, two weeks' notice, information to new joiners — and to ground it in Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR with a documented assessment.
What exactly has to be in the work regulations?
The purposes of the monitoring, its scope and the manner in which it is carried out. Vagueness here is what makes the rest of the procedure unusable: employees cannot be validly informed two weeks in advance about a scope that was never written down.
Do we need union agreement in Poland?
No. Where a collective agreement exists the monitoring rules can be recorded in it, but Polish law does not give a representative body a consent right over monitoring of the kind Germany, Austria and the Netherlands do. The obligations are procedural and informational.
Sources and scope
Primary source: Poland regulator and statute references, last read 2026-09-17.
This page is a plain-English summary of published law and regulator guidance, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for advice on your own facts. Employment and data protection law changes; each page states the date its sources were last read. Before monitoring staff anywhere, take advice from qualified counsel in that country.
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