| Forget
Big Brother, these days the IT staff may be watching
by Lisa Antonelli Bacon
Virginia Business
May 2005
Recently, a young brokerage
employee in Richmond was stunned to see one of his
instant-message exchanges
on the screen of a co-worker. He’s not sure how
it was intercepted but says, “You quickly learn
to watch what you say.” The man, who didn’t
want his named disclosed, now makes a habit of telling
friends to censor their communications to his office.
A recent survey of more than
800 U.S. companies found that a majority monitor
employee e-mail. In Virginia,
as in other states, companies aren’t required
to tell workers about the snooping. (Only Connecticut
and Delaware have laws requiring employee notification). “Employees
don’t have a general rule of privacy that is
recognized in Virginia,” says Marguerite R. Ruby,
president of ProWorkplace, a division of Hunton & Williams
that provides customized workplace training. “It
is such a changing area of law, [accommodating] society’s
views on personal privacy and protection of property — all
those competing interests.”
During a recent presentation
to a professional group, Ruby identified the failure
to regulate e-mail and
Internet use as one of the top 10 employment risks.
E-mail has revolutionized business practices, but,
used inappropriately, those electronic messages can
increase the risk of liability for companies in such
areas as sexual harassment and employment discrimination.
And don’t think erasing the evidence will get
anyone out of trouble. Backup copies or long-term storage
that employees don’t even know about can provide
all the information needed.
Until the legal system catches
up, Ruby says employers and workers are best protected
with one simple stopgap
measure: a written policy stating that the entire computer
system (office computers, Internet system, e-mail system
and software) is subject to company monitoring. “Employers
want to be forward thinking in their policies,” says
Ruby. And being proactive is the ticket. “This
is good business practice,” she adds, “both
in managing the ever-changing risk in this area and
in managing the employee relations impact of employer
monitoring.”
The question these days is not whether Big Brother
is watching, but how much he sees. Advances in software
technology allow corporations to tailor their systems
to spit out e-mails or instant messages with certain
industry-specific words, profanity or sexual references.
While some companies are concerned about the release
of proprietary information, others monitor to check
employee compliance with corporate governance standards.
With work e-mail anything
but private, one employee defense might be a “billboard” mentality:
hit the send key only if the e-mail would pass muster
if read on a highway billboard, because chances are
many sets of eyes are already seeing it.
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