Recording your reps' sales meetings: the six boxes an employer has to tick

Swiss employment law regulates systems that observe employees. It does not ban them when their purpose lies elsewhere, and sales training is a perfectly acceptable purpose. What it asks is that you write it down beforehand, not afterwards. Here is the exact list.

The principle, and the opening it leaves

Article 26 of Ordinance 3 to the Employment Act is short:

It is prohibited to use surveillance or monitoring systems intended to monitor the behaviour of employees at their workstation.

The test is what the system is intended for. A tool whose purpose is to monitor behaviour is ruled out. A tool with another purpose, where observation is only a side effect, falls under the second paragraph:

Where surveillance or monitoring systems are necessary for other reasons, they must in particular be designed and arranged so that they do not impair the health and the freedom of movement of employees.

A coaching setup falls under that second paragraph without difficulty, provided you can document it: the purpose is training and traceability of what was promised to the customer, not a permanent ranking of the sales team.

The six boxes to tick

The SECO commentary and the practice of the federal data protection authority converge on six points. They make a list you can use as it stands before a pilot.

• A purpose other than surveillance, in writing. Training, quality of advice, proof of what was said to the customer. Written before rollout.
• Prior information, transparent and detailed. Teams have to know what is captured, why, who looks at it and what is done with it.
• Consultation of the employees, and a record of the decision. Hear the objections, and say what you do with them.
• Proportionality examined. Less intrusive alternatives considered, and capture limited to what the purpose requires.
• Short retention and restricted access. The shortest useful period, and named accounts for access.
• No continuous capture. A bounded trigger, and preferably one in the rep's own hands.

The internal policy, the document that does the work

It all comes down to a written document handed to the teams. It covers the system used and what it captures, the purpose, who has access to the recordings and on what basis, the retention period and what happens at the end of it, the use that may or may not be made of the data in an appraisal, and the procedure by which an employee objects.

That last point is the one employee representatives read first, and it is the one that unblocks the discussion. A setup that states plainly what it will never be used for reads as a training tool, which is what it is.

What the framework rules out, and why that is good news

The five configurations below fall outside the framework. They are also, without exception, the ones that lose a sales team within three weeks. Here the law and adoption say the same thing.

• A public, permanent ranking of reps based on conversation scores.
• Manager access to the raw recording before the rep concerned has seen their own feedback.
• Capture that starts automatically on a location or calendar trigger, with no action from the rep.
• Indefinite retention “just in case”, with no bounded period and no effective purge.
• Use of an extract in disciplinary proceedings when the internal policy had not provided for it.

And in France

The regime is not identical but the logic is close: a defined purpose, prior information for employees, consultation of the social and economic committee where one exists, entry in the record of processing activities, proportionality and a bounded retention period. A setup built to hold up under Swiss employment law generally passes the French review without a rebuild.

The design choice behind MIHOS

MIHOS records at the rep's request, for the length of the meeting, and gives the rep their own feedback before the manager sees it. Access is by named account and logged, the retention period is set by the customer, and the product keeps the coaching layer separate from any other purpose. This is not legal window dressing: it is the only configuration in which a sales team keeps the tool past the third week.