Employee\'s E-Mail in the Year

¶ … Employee's E-Mail

In the year 2000, some 40 million e-mail users the world over transmitted more the 60 billion electronic communications, many of these sent to and from within the senders' workplaces (Feeley pp). The safest course for an employer is to have a clear written policy that is made known to employees and uniformly enforced (Feeley pp). E-mail monitoring by employers and employee privacy rights are significant issues facing employers and their workplaces (Feeley pp).

E-mail is likely the most frequently used means of communicating in the workplace, and certainly rivals telephone conferences and face-to-face meetings (Feeley pp). E-mail is a relatively new phenomenon, in that it was not so long ago that it was called "electronic mail" and was as foreign a concept as the "information superhighway" (Feeley pp). However, days of anonymity are long gone and today it has become a common and necessary tool used to facilitate communication, especially in the workplace, and in fact, has revolutionized the workplace (Feeley pp).

The reason e-mail has exploded is because it is fast and easy to use, and due to increasing workloads and decreasing available time, e-mail provides a way to manage the burden (Feeley pp). If someone needs an answer to a question, they just send an e-mail to a co-worker, thus eliminating voice mail or waiting for face-to-face meetings (Feeley pp). Moreover, it eliminates the worry concerning formalities, as well as the time and expense, that a letter requires (Feeley pp).

E-mail is at once less formal and potentially more personal, which may be two of the biggest shortcomings, because less formal means that senders have devoted less attention to what is being written (Feeley pp). And more personal means that senders may include confidential, offensive or sensitive information, believing that they are a sending private, intimate message for the recipients' eyes only (Feeley pp).

The added benefit of e-mail is that it is more direct, there is no lag time between composing the message, sending it electronically, and having it arrive at the receiver's computer terminal (Feeley pp). Senders expect and usually receive faster responses to e-mail than to telephone messages and formal written correspondence (Feeley pp). Senders can transmit detailed messages and attached documents with relative ease and, best of all, save time doing it (Feeley pp). Today, people do not think twice about e-mail, and that may be a problem because less caution and care can lead to litigation or other problems (Feeley pp). For example, someone who inadvertently sends a presumably private e-mail complaining about his boss to everyone in the office, including his boss (Feeley pp). E-mail can take on a life of its own and can be distributed, copied and read without senders' knowledge once they hit that "send" button (Feeley pp). Moreover, because e-mail is often used in conjunction with a computer network system, it is stored on the system, so even if users have deleted it from their in or out box, a supervisor can simply have the stored messages printed to review (Feeley pp). Yet, e-mail can be an invaluable legal tool because it provides a written record with which to support or defend allegations, and is admissible at trial (Feeley pp).

Many companies now monitor and store all e-mails in an effort to ensure that abusive messages are not being sent out or received, but few employers notify their employees about what they do and do not do with e-mail (Giblin pp).

Incoming e-mail and even draft messages can be easily viewed, and any computer technician can log into any employee's e-mail inbox and read all the messages (Giblin pp).

Commenting to the graduating class at the University of Southern California, Michael Eisner said, "I have come to believe that if anything will bring about the downfall of a company, or maybe even a country, it is blind copies of e-mails that should never have been sent in the first place" (Griffaton pp). According to a 1999 study by the American Management Association, at least 50% of all workplace Internet activity is not business-related (Griffaton pp). One study by the ePolicy Institute found that 85% of employees admit to recreational surfing at work and seventy percent of employees admitted to receiving or sending adult-oriented personal e-mails at work, while 60% admitted to exchanging e-mail that could be considered racist, sexist or otherwise "politically incorrect" (Griffaton pp). In fact most traffic to Internet pornographic sites occurs during regular business hours, probably because Internet connections usually are faster in the workplace (Griffaton pp). Companies have taken note of these statistics and have adopted e-mail and Internet usage policies that contain provisions for continuous or random monitoring of usage (Griffaton pp).

The ePolicy Institute study reports that 77% of employers monitor employees' e-mail and Internet use, in fact, 10% of workers with e-mail and Internet access, roughly 14 million people, are under continuous online surveillance (Griffaton pp). Approximately two thirds of employers have disciplined or terminated employees for violating electronic usage policies (Griffaton pp). Generally, employers monitor employees' e-mail because they wish to maintain their professional reputation and image, and also are concerned with employee productivity and business efficiency, since "cyberslacking accounts for 30 to 40% of lost worker productivity" (Griffaton pp). Therefore, monitoring assists employers in preventing and discouraging sexual or other illegal workplace harassment, defamation, copyright violations from the illegal downloading of software, music and movies, and the deliberate or inadvertent disclosure of trade secrets and other confidential information (Griffaton pp). According to the ePolicy Institute study, 68% of employers that monitor cite legal liability as their primary reason (Griffaton pp).