E-mail systems should come with a warning label: "Caution: Do not use e-mail without adult supervision."
Employees and employers alike make incorrect assumptions about e-mail usage in the workplace. Employees assume that because it's their work e-mail account, on their work computer, in their office space -- it's theirs. Employers presume the same, but vice versa.
Both parties are wrong.
"Employees have no rights to their e-mail," says Richard Cellini, vice president of Integrity Interactive, an ethics and compliance training firm. Everything from the computer to the office, even the chairs, belongs to the company, he says. "It doesn't matter what system you use, it matters where you're sitting when you use it. E-mail belongs to the employer, not the employee. We may not like that, but we need to be aware of that."
Likewise, the fact that some employees don't know their rights when it comes to e-mail at work might not be their fault. More than 10 percent of companies said they had no formal policy for acceptable use of e-mail, according to a 2007 survey conducted by Forrester Consulting for Proofpoint Inc., which provides e-mail security and data loss prevention solutions for organizations.
For those organizations that do have established guidelines, most are too long, complicated and legalistic for employees to understand, says Michael Overly, partner at Foley & Lardner, a California-based law firm.
"If employees can't understand the policy, they can't be held in breach of breaking the policy," he says.
Don't let your e-mail use get you in trouble at work. Follow Cellini's tips for employees using work e-mail.
"Mutual respect" is one of three large brackets that Cellini says companies worry about in regards to e-mail. Keeping that in mind, he discourages employees to use e-mail to:
- Discriminate
- Harass
- Disparage
- Make obscene or vulgar comments
- Offend others
Or to discuss:
- Race
- Gender
- Religion
- Sexuality
- Legality
- Price-fixing with competitors
Dos and don'ts
Companies with e-mail abuse problems generally run into basic dos and don'ts as the main issue, Cellini says. Here are his top three for each:
- Do ensure your e-mail is factual, accurate and specific
- Don't create a document unnecessarily
- Do expressly indicate opinions, estimates and assumptions
- Don't disclose the company's proprietary or confidential information
- Do ask whether the document needs to be written at all
- Don't speculate about the potential legality of a situation
Questions to ask yourself before sending e-mail
If employees would stop to think about the content they are sending in an e-mail, they would avoid many problems, Cellini says. Ask yourself the following questions before hitting send:
- Would I be comfortable if my e-mail appeared in the newspaper or on the Internet?
- Would I be comfortable if my comments were quoted out of context?
- Does my e-mail reflect positively on the company? On me?
Suffer the consequences
The negative impacts of e-mail can be severe, ranging from destruction of important relationships (personal and business) to termination or criminal/legal liabilities, Cellini says. Here are a few of the possibilities for e-mail policy violations:
- Warning
- Formal written reprimand
- Mandatory counseling
- Termination of employment