Designing an E-mail Monitoring System

On an average day 2.8 billion e-mail messages are sent among 130 million American workers (Ciocchetti, 2001). Most companies have made e-mail accessible to their employees to improve both intra-company communication and communication with the clients of the company. This provides a benefit to the company by significantly decreasing the intra-office paper correspondence like memorandums. The employees benefit by being able to work efficiently and avoid interrupting others in the office while doing business.

However, this new system has resulted in the attempt to balance privacy of employees with the need for the company to keep productivity high. In an attempt to ensure that they are getting their full productivity out of their employees, employers often monitory the e-mail of the company. For years, employees have monitored telephone calls and some have even monitored the time employees spend on bathroom breaks each day. The monitoring of e-mail is just the latest step in this scrutinizing of employee's use of time. Of those companies that monitor the internet communications of their employees, 26% have fired workers for misuse of the internet and 25% have fired them for e-mail abuse (Sandberg, 2005). The CEO of Boeing was fired for sending e-mails with explicitly sexual language to a woman he was dating in the company. The language of the mail violated the company's code of conduct and he was fired for the possible embarrassment that those e-mails could cause the company (Tam, White et al., 2005).

In an effort to develop an e-mail system, it is first imperative that the reasons behind monitoring are defined. It is important to monitor the e-mail coming out of a company to ensure the upkeep of the image of the company, to ensure that trade secrets and other confidential information is not shared with others and to protect the company against litigation regarding employee statements made with the company name attached. Furthermore, e-mail can be monitored among employees to ensure that rules regarding sexual harassment and other human resource associated policies are followed. According to WebSense, an e-mail monitoring software company, the cost to employers for web-slacking and e-mail issues is estimated at $138 billion (Hoffman, Hartman, et al., 2003).

There are numerous computer programs that are currently on the market that can monitor e-mail. According to Tenable security, a full e-mail application should record a wide selection of information from all e-mails received on the corporate server (Hoffman, Hartman, et al., 2003). This includes the e-mail recipient, sender, number of words in e-mail, time employee spends reading the e-mail, time employee spends composing e-mail, number of attachments and the type of e-mail (business or non-business). A simple program, offered by many companies, will only record the employee name and the date and time the email was picked up by the employee (Ciocchetti, 2001).

The laws regarding the privacy of employees vary from state to state and often only refer to employees of the government. Those employed in the private sector are not usually covered by current legislation. In 1986, the federal government passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that "prohibits the intentional or willful interception, accession, disclosure, or use of one's electronic communication (which is defined as any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sound, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectric, or photocell system that affects interstate commerce). (Ciocchetti, 2001)" The exception to this rule includes the provider exception which allows monitoring when the company provides the e-mail system. It also provides the ordinary course of business exception has not been tested with regards to e-mail yet. The consent exception is most often used by companies. This exception provides for the consent by a notice given to all employees that states that the e-mail of the company is regularly monitored (Ciocchetti, 2001). Many companies have included this notice as part of their hiring packet to avoid any confusion.

To develop an e-mail system in an existing company I believe it is important to ensure company wide consensus prior to any policy action. Each department needs to be represented to ensure that all aspects of business are represented. This focus group should be on a completely volunteer basis and some consideration should be made to make those members comfortable. Confidentiality should be ensured to all employees to make sure that they can participate without fear of retribution no matter what they might say. Having an outside agency conduct the focus group would be the best way to secure anonymity. If an outside agency is not used, facilitators must be trained to elicit information without being prying and they must sincerely believe in the confidentiality of the process. At least at the beginning of the focus groups, supervisors and/or management should be kept separate from the other employees. This will make the employees feel more comfortable and be more likely to be honest with their feelings about e-mail monitoring.

All the fears of employee privacy should be discussed throughout this process. It is also important to decide upon what is acceptable practice within e-mails and what should constitute excessive or improper use. Using employee input on the overall policy is essential before looking at software for the administration of monitoring.

Once a basic policy has been developed by the focus groups, human resources and legal must review to ensure lawfulness and lack of redundancy. Following this process, Information Technology will be expected to provide a short list of three possible software programs that can fit the needs of the company and the policy created. Management will then meet with the IT department to select the best program.

The program chosen should have a keyword search feature. This feature, enabled on most of the monitoring programs available, uses a computer to search through e-mail text. Key words that are selected for filtering of e-mails are dependent upon the company. For example, a hospital or healthcare company would use keywords such as "patient file" or "test results" to filter through e-mail. The program searches through the text of incoming and outgoing mail for these words, much like a search engine searches through on-line content. When the program identifies key words, the e-mail is shuttled into a separate file for independent review. More advanced programs now not only identify words within the text of an e-mail but will scan for the context of the surrounding words. SurfControl, an e-mail monitoring company, states that his company has fourteen lists that contain hundreds of words for various industries (Sandberg, 2005).

Before the program has been implemented, a worker's rights seminar should be conducted to ensure that all employees understand what will be monitored and how the process will work under the new system. This will give employees an opportunity to voice any last concerns they have about their privacy under the new policy.

Once the new policy and programs are implemented, it is important to continually monitor the feeling of the employees. This can be done through current employee feedback systems as long as anonymity is once again protected. It also is important to monitor the software program for efficiency and usefulness. With the ever changing technology and lexicon of business, the program must be kept as up-to-date as possible.

Many employees fear the e-mail monitoring system because they fear their managers and supervisors will be able to read all personal and business e-mail that they send out throughout the day. However, by ensuring employee participation throughout the process and using the most current technology, e-mail monitoring need not be a complete invasion of privacy.

Works Cited

Ciocchetti, Corey A. (2001, July 25). Monitoring employee e-mail: efficient workplaces vs. employee privacy. Retrieved April 20, 2006, from Duke Law & Technology Review Web site: http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2001dltr0026.html

Hoffman, W. Michael, Hartman, Laura P., Rowe, Mrak (2003).You've got mail ... and the boss knows. Business and Society Review. [103(3)], 285-307.

Sandberg, Jared (2005, May 18). Monitoring of workers is boss's right but why not include top brass?. Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition, p. B1.

Tam, Pui-Wing, White, Erin, Wingfield, Nick, & Maher, Kris (2005, March 9). Snooping e-mail by software is now a workplace norm. Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition, p. B1.