Tag Archives for training

Whats your view on email monitoring within the workplace?

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.

Key recommendations for Email Monitoring

Below is a list of 9 key recommendations for Email Monitoring:

1. Conduct an Impact Assessment to identify the business purpose for email monitoring and confine it to what is necessary to accomplish that purpose. Monitoring should only be used as necessary and not be intrusive on the employees’ email communication.

2. Develop, or modify, corporate policies that cover email use (such as the Acceptable Use Policy, Information Security Policy and/or Computer Use Policy). Make sure that all users accept these policies and they are documented.

3. Train users on current best practices of email management and use.

4. Allow management to appraise their staff regarding email use and what standards will be used to evaluate their performance.

5. Enforce and police all policies regarding email use at all times.

6. Consider which email monitoring tools are appropriate for the organisation. Only implement when supporting processes, procedures and resources are in place.

7. Frequently review and update corporate policies to ensure they fully comply with the law and regulations, and any changes thereafter.

8. Communicate any changes of policy to all email users and management.

9. Thoroughly consider the costs of excessive monitoring, such as ethics, low morale, high turnover, and potential lawsuits.


Other Recent Posts:

  1. Nearly 50% of UK firms fire abusive emailers - 2nd Jun 2008
  2. Email Compliance and the use of Email Filtering - 31st Dec 2007
  3. Email spam - becoming sound practice! - 7th Nov 2007
  4. Email Security (Encryption) 2007 Review - 2nd Oct 2007
  5. Lost emails cause 5m hours of IT Management time - 25th Sep 2007
  6. Turning your email address into a phone call - 6th Sep 2007
  7. links for 2007-08-21 - 21st Aug 2007
  8. Sitemap - 21st Aug 2007
  9. Trend Micro joins the SaaS team for email protection - 14th Aug 2007
  10. E-mail stress keeps 1 in 3 workers on edge of Inbox - 13th Aug 2007
  11. links for 2007-08-07 - 7th Aug 2007
  12. links for 2007-07-31 - 1st Aug 2007
  13. links for 2007-07-27 - 27th Jul 2007
  14. Over 50% of UK business users are hooked on their inboxes - 24th Jul 2007
  15. Proofpoint - Outbound Email and Content Security 2007 Report - 24th Jul 2007