Though it May Feel Invasive, Monitoring is Crucial to Protecting your Firm.

Ever since technology entered the workplace, it has raised the question of what’s public and what’s private. A major issue for employers is email. Employees treat it like a private thing, but the reality is that email is a public space in the eyes of the law. Pretending – and acting – otherwise opens up your business for liability and embarrassment.

Like the other public areas of your business, email communication needs to be monitored. This can feel strange to anyone who thinks of his or her correspondence as private, but there are a number of reasons why minority business owners should monitor emails. Monitoring helps avoid the risks of negative email. There are tools to help monitoring be an unobtrusive part of your regular risk management processes. By using these tools and educating employees about the real nature of email, it is possible to protect your business and stay aware of any emerging email situations..

Why You Should Monitor

Monitoring email is a business imperative because in the eyes of the law, email is not private personal correspondence. Instead, employee email is considered documentation of conversations, meaning that any and all messages sent or received can be subject to use in litigation, according to the Center for Competitive Management and the Duke Law Department.

Contrary to what they may personally think about email, case after case has established that employees should have no reasonable expectation of privacy when using work email. Instead, every email, text message, or instant message chat is open ground for establishing precedent, standards, dates, times, and attitudes inside your firm – and this includes commentary posted on social media sites and forums. As a responsible manager, there is no choice in today’s litigious culture when it comes to monitoring email and social media activity. It is an expected part of firm operations and a demanded document by courts around the country.

Risks of Negative Email

For those still squirming about the idea of monitoring email or social media, consider the many risks of negative or inappropriate employee comments. One bad email can destroy a firm’s reputation, ruin the life of an employee, or create liability in a court case. These “innocent, personal conversations” are actually the first stones thrown in many disasters.

One bad email can destroy a carefully cultivated corporate image, changing a firm forever in the eyes of clients and partners. Consider the emails sent by junior analysts at investment banks mocking the very same stocks they were recommending to clients. Companies being mocked sued the banks, and clients walked out the door in anger. Whether the emails were jokes or not, now no one trusts Wall Street in general to be telling the truth, and penalties for the firms went all the way up to $35 million.

Email also allows gossip to go viral with a single click of the mouse. Rumors of illness, affairs, or drunken nights out can spread across the country in seconds. These messages can ruin employee harmony, destroy morale, and create corporate liability for hostile work environment, sexual harassment, or discrimination cases.

In no case is email wholly harmless. It’s a useful productivity tool, but by thinking of it as a personal communication, employees tend to become casual in what they say and do over email. Jokes, forwards in poor taste, instantly transmitted rants, email wars-these things and others like them can negatively affect your firm in so many ways that considering all of them is a recipe for nightmares.

Monitoring Tools

Once you’ve accepted the need for monitoring – and 66 percent of businesses do, according to the Society for Human Resource Management – the next step is finding the tools to monitor efficiently. You want something that catches major violations of corporate policy but not something that is going to consume every waking hour.

For online activity monitoring, the content being monitored is anything posted to open accounts. As a result, setting up Google Alerts for key company phrases or employee names can provide the alerts needed for activity without subjecting you to every inane employee post about their life on personal blogs. Hiring a reputation manager from an outside agency is also cost and time effective for many firms.

Internally, there is no email monitoring technology that is going to ensure no company communication policy is ever broken. However, together with Internet use safeguards, there are a number of all-in-one software packages that offer archiving and tracking of employee email. Some include attachment scans and keyword technology to flag messages that may be problematic. Examples of software suites include WorkExaminer, SpectorSoft, NetVizor, and SONAR Enterprise.

Educating Employees In The Modern Age

Knowing the corporate side of email monitoring responsibility and liability, minority business owners will want to be sure to educate their employees about the nature of work email in the modern age. This is an education that can start before hiring with monitoring disclosures and it should continue throughout the employment relationship with periodic training.

Prior to bringing employees into the organization, the Center for Competitive Management recommends having all staff sign acknowledgment of monitoring. This lets them know that conversations are not private and removes illusions about any reasonable expectation of privacy when using work email. It also opens the door for the “fishbowl” conversation – reminding employees that in the work setting, everything they do should be considered to be in a fishbowl, and that if they wouldn’t want others to see it – don’t write it!

Once employees are in the firm, periodic education can help prevent unfortunate emails. Since email is a form of documentation, establishing an appropriate documentation policy helps keep needed information in while outlining what content and commentary should be left out. The future of the technology age is moving toward more transparency in communications and operations, so firms that have strong parameters about what’s right and what’s not protect themselves in the present and with an eye toward future disclosure possibilities.

Monitoring employee email may feel like a “Big Brother” experience, but it is a necessary reality of the modern world. With the push toward greater openness and disclosure, firms have to protect themselves and their employees from litigation and risk. By establishing standards and keeping an eye on communications, firms and staff have the power to control their image, reduce risk, and ensure that only desired pieces of information pass into the fishbowl of public record.

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