Big Brother Has Mail
I recently heard a remarkable confession. A staff member told me, "I just assume you're reading all my e-mails." Her husband, a mid-level manager in a nearby city, routinely reads employee e-mails as company policy.
But another person said "THEY" are always reading e-mails. "Everything we do is being watched now," she complained. "We're supposed to use e-mail, but why should we? Someone is reading them."
E-mail was cute in the 1998 Nora Ephron romantic comedy You've Got Mail, in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan portray characters who fall in love online. As a MacGuffin it captured the public fancy, an image of virtual ships passing in digital darkness. But in 1999 Salon reported company monitoring of e-mail that included firings at the New York Times and Xerox. "Personal computers were supposed to liberate the workplace," worries the author. "So why do so many companies use them to spy on workers?"
(Short answer: because they can!)
In 2001 CNN reported 72 percent of human resource professionals check employee e-mails. Forty percent of the time it's for cause. But most of the time, it's random. In 2005, the technology site CNET reported 63 percent of companies with a thousand or more employees staff to specifically read e-mail. This follows overall trends to monitor what an employee does at work.
Big Brother may be reading your e-mail. The above comments mirror the reality and reaction.
E-mail, despite its private feel, is like a notice tacked to a bulletin board in a lobby. A manager should use proper e-mail etiquette (as I've written about here, for instance) but also remind employees of the "public" nature of this "discoverable" correspondence.
For the record, I don't read employees' e-mails. Most days, I have barely the time to read my own.