Monitoring Your Employees' E-Mail

In the law, there is a concept called "expectation of privacy", which is something that is afforded to all American citizens. For example, items that you store in your house, your car, your locker and other private properties are expected to be kept private for the owner. Expectation of privacy keeps law enforcement and other authority figures from performing unlawful searches and seizures without proper documentation (a warrant, for example). One of the places where U.S. citizens have reasonable expectation of privacy is in their e-mail accounts, which raises the issue of employers monitoring their employees' e-mail.

There are hundreds of reasons why you might want to monitor your employees' e-mail accounts. For one, you want to make sure that correspondence with colleagues, clients and vendors is always professional. For another, you will want the right to investigate the possibility of your employees participating in illegal or inappropriate behavior on the Internet. If an employee is breaking corporate policy, downloading pornography or disclosing company secrets, the employer has a right to investigate it.

When monitoring your employees' e-mail, however, you must take the necessary precautions to ensure that you are staying on the right side of the law. If your activities are found to be inviolation of reasonable expectation of privacy, you could be facing both civil lawsuits and criminal charges.

Only Monitor Employees' E-Mail on Corporate Accounts

While you are usually within your rights to monitor employees' e-mail accounts that are registered through your business (i.e. bill@xyzcompany.com), you don't have the right to monitor e-mail on personal accounts (i.e. name@yahoo.com). When your employees use e-mail through your company name, all correspondence is technically your property, and employees don't have reasonable expectation of privacy. The same is true for conversations held with customers from company phone lines and other forms of corporate correspondence.

Place a Disclaimer on the Log-In Screen

Even if your employees are using company e-mail accounts, they might still be able to claim reasonable expectation of privacy. To ensure that all of your bases are covered, place a disclaimer on the screen where your employees log in to their accounts. State that the system is company property, which takes away the expectation of privacy. You should have a similar clause in the employee handbook and you might want to send out a notice informing employees of this fact.

Have a System in Place

You can further protect yourself and your business by having a policy or procedure for checking employee e-mail accounts. For example, you could state that you will only monitor employee e-mail if there is a suspicion of inappropriate behavior. You could also have a system for randomly checking e-mails sent from employee accounts to check for professionalism. Further, you should have requirements for the length of time for which employees are required to keep e-mails in their archives or folders. This allows you to monitor e-mails that have been sent over a long period of time.

Use Common Sense

Finally, if you feel that you are unjustly violating your employees' right to privacy, don't do it. Chances are, if it feels wrong to you, it will probably be perceived as wrong to the employee, and that is how lawsuits are filed. Your employees will feel as though you don't trust them if you are constantly monitoring their e-mail accounts, and you don't want to create a negative atmosphere in the office. Further, you shouldn't need to monitor employees' e-mail unless you suspect that something illegal or unethical is taking place.