Changes to UK Sexual Offences Act could mean negligent companies face listing on the registry.
The inclusion of email harassment in the revised UK Sexual Offences Act could open companies up to legal troubles, said an industry insider.
The UK Sexual Offences Act 2003 was recently updated to include “improper use of public communications.” Because of this, a person sending sexually harassing emails could be handed a sexual offences prevention order (SOPO) and therefore be included on the national sex offender registry.
“It really has tremendous implications for any organisation because the widening of the sexual offenders act could mean employers have vicarious liability,” said Ed Macnair, CEO of internet security firm Marshal. “The person sending is prosecutable, but also the organisation.” He cited one case where a London hospital was held liable in a harassment suit involving members of staff and another in the US where an employee’s wife sued her husband’s firm because they facilitated his child pornography habits.
“You don’t want your chief operating officer on the sexual offender registry because somebody in the company did something,” Macnair said.
Source: ITPro
Recent studies indicate that when customers or potential customers contact an online organisation, 80% prefer communicating by email over phone and over 50% will not do business with a company if they do not receive an adequate response to their email within 24 hours. The average response time to a customer email inquiry is 72 hours.
Most online organisations communicate regularly with customers and clients by email, but few provide a level of email customer service that satisfies their customers. While email service standards are low, the benefits of communicating via email are palpable:
- Cost – an email conversation generally costs 75% less than a phone conversation.
- Time – the time it takes to respond to an email is significantly less than a phone call. Email also allows both the customer and your company representative to multi-task, responding to email messages while attending to other matters.
- History – email allows for the easy tracking and retrieval of email conversations, which ensures accountability and allows for organisational benefits derived from the sharing of customer history and knowledge.
Source: deerfield.com (providers of email management systems)
This blog site has been created to discuss the use of email monitoring and email filtering in the workplace.
I would like to hear your personal or professional views on the monitoring of email communications when adopted within an organisation.
This will be an open discussion to try to get different views from employees, administrators, middle management and company directors.
If you can touch on issues such as:
- How monitoring may affect staff morale and performance?
- Your rights to personal communications (maintaining your rights to privacy within the workplace, aka, the US/EU law on maintaining your rights to private life)
- When should email monitoring be adopted within an organisation?
- What is good about email monitoring, and in what circumstances?
- What is bad about email monitoring, and how can it be implemented better?
- Examples in the use of over-invasive email monitoring methods
- Do you agree or disagree with the guidelines and national regulations governing the monitoring of emails within the workplace?
- What are the alternatives to email monitoring (e.g. user education, better policy setting)
You can add any other relevant topics/points into the discussion.
If you wish to have your say then feel free to add your comments to this blog post. I would love to hear your view on this topic.
Please do not list any company, vendor or product names (or other identifiable information). If you do so, then your comments will be deleted and your opinions will not be read.
Written on 03 October 2006
by Dicontas Blog Admin under
Email Monitoring, Stories, Surveys
with
Tagged with business_email, business_operations, email_communications, email_filtering, email_management, email_monitoring, employee_productivity, ethics, legal_compliance, management, policy, privacy, staff_monitoring, staff_morale, staff_performance, training, user_education
This is a business-focused blog area specialising in email monitoring, email filtering, content filtering, email administration, services, issues and related news.
It is primarily aimed at IT and HR business professionals within organisations that monitor its business email communications for email compliance – and to ensure that company security and policy standards are being adhered to.
Also discussed is general advice for other blog administrators. e.g. the use of WordPress as a blogging tool, WordPress plugins to make the blog feature rich, and other topics on search engine optimisation (SEO).
I hope you enjoy this site and that it is informative for your needs.
This blog is managed by Dicontas – providers of outsourced email filtering administration, email monitoring administration and centralised email content assessment services.
Written on 08 August 2006
by Dicontas Blog Admin under
Company News, Dicontas Services, Feature Requests, General Info, Other, Reviews, Support, Surveys
with
Tagged with business_email, computer_security, dicontas, email_administration, email_communications, email_monitoring, HR, IT, policy, Wordpress & Plugins