Before you hit the “send” button on your workplace computer, know this: Odds are, you are being watched.
Just ask Sarah, a corporate banker in New York. She expected a normal workday when she stepped into her Manhattan office on a Monday morning in June. Instead, her boss immediately escorted her to his manager’s office, where representatives from human resources were already there.
“I was told that according to company policy, they were allowed to read employees’ e-mails and had read mine,” said Sarah, who asked her real name not be used. “They made the assertion that I had sent confidential company information in my e-mails.”
A top producer in her department, Sarah was terminated, effective immediately. “I was baffled. I couldn’t believe it.”
Her managers refused to disclose the content of the e-mails to her, stating they were company property. But Sarah later figured out the e-mails that landed her in hot water were “chatty, gossipy” missives sent to two former co-workers.
“It was just kind of funny venting” about co-workers and her boss, she said. “There was nothing confidential about the bank or a client. I was fired for gossipy e-mail, essentially.”
Sarah, whose department was downsized shortly after she left, suspects she was a victim of a maneuver to reduce headcount cheaply. “I in no way feel guilty.”
But she does feel wiser. “Now I would only write an e-mail as if everyone in my department and everyone in management would read it,” said Sarah, who remains unemployed. “I will no longer use e-mail as a communication tool to friends.”
It’s easy for workers to be lulled into a sense of false privacy when they’re typing on their desktop computers, says Ted Stamatakos, a partner in the Chicago labor and employment law firm Seyfarth Shaw At Work. “Something peculiar happens when communications become electronic. The nature of it creates an illusion of privacy and an illusion of security.”
But Stamatakos says employees are making a mistake if they think no one is watching what they do while online. “The overwhelming majority of employers today engage in some kind of monitoring of how their employees use e-mail and the Internet.”
A 2001 survey by the American Management Association found that 63 percent of large and mid-sized companies monitor their employees’ Internet use, and 46.5 percent store and review their workers’ e-mail messages.
They’re doing it to protect themselves. When workers misuse e-mail and the Internet, their actions can expose their employers to potential lawsuits, loss of trade secrets or charges of sexual harassment–not to mention the loss in productivity that happens when a worker spends hours playing computer solitaire.
Daniel Pelc, an attorney with Minneapolis-based Kroll Ontrack, a firm that specializes in recovering electronic evidence and data, says that e-mail represents one of the biggest potential security breaches for any major corporation. The reason? Employees can use it to easily send trade secrets to competitors or to expose corporations’ business plans to rival firms.
At the same time, inappropriate e-mails or downloads can open companies up to potential lawsuits. For example, Integrated Information Systems, a technology and business consulting firm in Tempe, Ariz., recently paid $1 million to settle a lawsuit with the Recording Industry Association of America over copyrighted MP3 music files that workers downloaded over its computer network.
Companies aren’t required to inform employees of monitoring, but many employers have written policies that outline what an employer can and cannot do. Courts generally have sided with employers because workers are on company time and using company equipment.
So, how do you prevent raising a virtual red flag with your employer? Here’s what labor experts say gets employees in trouble:
– Sending strategic information about their employers’ products or services through cyberspace. Tom Mandler, a partner with the Chicago branch of law firm Quarles & Brady LLP, represents management in labor and employment matters. He has represented firms whose employees have downloaded business plans or trade secrets into their work computers, then used company e-mail to send this information to their home computers.
“That’s a very suspicious act,” Mandler said. “Companies will take a close look at that, especially if there’s no good reason for an employee to be sending that information to his home.”
– E-mailing harassing or offensive messages. Andy Kindler, a partner at Lisle-based Oak Consulting, recently represented a company in which one of its employees was using office e-mail to communicate with co-worker with whom he had a romantic relationship. The problem? The relationship had started out as a consensual one but became one-sided after one of the employees broke it off. The jilted employee, though, wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and had resorted to e-mailing messages daily to the co-worker.
“Fortunately, we were able to get both parties in the same room to talk about this,” Kindler said. “We explained to the employee who was sending the harassing e-mail messages that e-mailing comments to someone is no different from walking by that person’s workspace and saying something. It’s still harassment.”
– Another popular abuse of e-mail became common after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said Giovinella Gonthier, owner and president of Chicago-based Civility Associates. Employees were passing along e-mails to their co-workers expressing strong political and religious beliefs and castigating entire ethnic groups.
– Using company computers to access pornography, visit gambling sites or trade offensive jokes. Stamatakos says that such misuses represent by far the most common form of Internet or e-mail abuse by employees. Unfortunately, they also can open companies up to lawsuits.
For instance, Mandler once represented a company where an employee was attempting to send a dirty joke to a friend. The employee accidentally sent the joke to an unknown third party, who threatened to sue. The company avoided the lawsuit by firing the employee and providing a gift certificate to the third party.
– Using company equipment to search for a new job. Just ask the worker at one of the firms represented by Mandler who inadvertently left his resume on his computer screen for all to see. “His exit from the company was hastened,” Mandler said.
– Ranting about a boss or co-worker over the company’s e-mail system also can get a person fired, or worse, accused of defamation.
Employees can’t hide what they’ve done online by simply pressing their computers’ “delete” buttons, Pelc said.
“People use e-mail as a communication tool, when it is actually a document-creation tool,” Pelc said. “Everything you do online creates a written record that is stored in your computer’s hard drive” or on a company server.
The tools available to companies to help them monitor e-mail and Internet use have steadily grown more sophisticated. For example, employers today can use software tools that not only show them what Web sites an employee visited, but also will tell them exactly what images and text from these sites their worker actually displayed on his computer screen.However, most employers understand that workers will use their e-mail system for some personal communication.
“There was a time when employers told us we couldn’t use their telephones to make personal phone calls,” Kindler said. “Companies will ignore some personal use by their employees as long as it’s not being too abused.”
