How far should your employers monitor your e-mail?

Throughout the world, hundreds of employees have been fired from companies for alleged misuse of e-mail. A survey in the US showed that 25% of businesses eavesdropped on employees' e-mail, computer files and Internet usage. I guess the figure can only be higher now.

I'm interested in looking at the picture from both sides. For employers especially in litigious countries, the dangers posed by unbridled employee usage of company e-mail is very real and very expensive. In the article You'd Think Bill Gates Would Learn, Bill's discussion of schemes against a corporate enemy in e-mail was apparently admitted as evidence in an antitrust testimony. In another case, when workers of a US airline were suspected of coordinating a sick-out, the home computers of more than 20 workers were seized for forensic examination in an effort to uncover incriminating email. Along with email, other private correspondence and financial records were examined.

A number of similar cautionary tales on this site describes damaging cases that range from slurs between employees to outright cheating. Malaysia and Singapore are relatively wired nations. We've undoubtedly had our share of corporate e-mail scandals despite a general absence of public data.

Although the prospect of being eavesdropped upon is unpleasant, employer monitoring of employee communications is nothing new. It started way back in the days before e-mail. Only now, key-word sniffing software makes it much easier to snoop on cached e-mails. The scenario of the system spitting out embarrassing dossiers of employee communication, while seemingly farfetched now, can happen. The technology for it has existed for some time. But systems are not known for subjective analysis and there's always the danger of harmless co-worker banter appearing incriminating on paper. So its not unjustified that employees are beginning to wonder how far should their employers go in monitoring their electronic communications.

I think it is not unreasonable for an employer to place some safeguards on company e-mail usage because the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. The Bill Gates case illustrates this clearly. It takes very little for a disgruntled employee to use e-mail to cause irreparable damage to the value and goodwill of a company that well-intentioned people had taken years to build. At the same time, totalitarian e-mail policies can also be counterproductive. It only pushes employees to use services like free webmail for daily business communication, an act that can put company secrets at risk.

Ultimately, I believe an e-mail policy that balances corporate and employee interests is best, one written by mature professionals who understand the psychology of human communication and not by some IT technocrat with atrocious people skills. I notice that in Asia, whenever it comes to the control of IT based resources, many CEOs still have the tendency to push the decisions back to technical folk, many of whom have no skills to write policy.

Personally, I do believe the best defense an employee can have against the tyranny of e-mail data mining is to use e-mail sparingly. Try working "off the grid" as much as you can especially when working in sensitive areas or with sensitive people. You'll find that having a discussion on the phone or a face-to-face meeting are not only harder to record but are often less stressful and far more productive. Try not to believe the hype that e-mail makes work more efficient because too often it has proven to give the opposite effect.

This article from the Houston Business Journal should provide some food for thought on this topic.