DO YOU KNOW YOUR COMPANY'S E-MAIL POLICY?

by Susan H. Confair

Whether you are an employer or an employee you should know your company's e-mail policy. Two issues that arise with the use of e-mail in the work place are that of:

1. privacy - does your company have a policy on monitoring employee e-mail
2. legal discovery - what is your company's policy on retaining or deleting e-mail messages that could be used as part of legal discovery in the event of a lawsuit.

The privacy issue stems from the fact that e-mail messages transmitted within a company can be both personal and business related and typically are accessible by all persons with access to the company computers. Employees may be under the misguided impression that their e-mail messages are private and not accessible by their employer or other employees. An employer has the right to know what type of production is being generated during the work day by their employees which would include computer transmittals. Therefore, the need for a company e-mail policy which lays the parameters for the monitoring of e-mail.

There may be various types of e-mail policies that a company may enact ranging from the least restrictive which would be a policy of no e-mail monitoring unless required by law or to investigate a crime to the most restrictive which would be a company policy of unlimited monitoring wherein all e-mail messages would be accessible to the company at any time and for any purpose. Whatever the policy may be, and the company will make that decision, you should be aware of the type of e-mail monitoring that may occur in your work place.

Companies that find a need to monitor their employees' e-mail should get their employees to sign off on the monitoring in advance. The safest approach for a company is to state explicitly that the company has unlimited access to employee e-mail.

Companies should include as part of their policy on e-mail guidelines as to what is and what is not appropriate subject matter for e-mail. E-mail messages even after deleted by the sender or recipient is most likely backed-up on the companies hard drive and will continue to exist in the companies back-up file until destroyed or written over. A company may wish to include e-mail in their document retention and destruction policies and establish a consistent policy on how the e-mail messages will be treated. Such a policy will be helpful in the event of any future legal discovery requested.