Legal & Regulatory Compliance - Email Monitoring & Email Filtering

Legal Compliance in Email Monitoring & Email Filtering

Maintaining Legal Compliance & Reducing Liability Risk

Legal compliance and regulatory compliance issues are quickly becoming a major focus for businesses. UK workplace monitoring laws have now made company executives personally liable for any failings to provide a safe working environment for employees.

Failing to provide a safe working environment can lead to considerable legal liability risk. This requirement covers a wide range of responsibilities.

Employees should be protected from:

Inappropriate or offensive content – such as pornography, profanity, and lewd language
Discrimination – by age, race, nationality, or economic status
Harassment – whether sexual, religious, or bullying

Employees also have legal obligations towards their employers:

To not defame the organisation or bring the company into disrepute
To not use company resources illegally, for instance by sending spam or storing illegal images
To safeguard company security
To protect confidential data and intellectual property
To always treat email messages as if they were written on a corporate letterhead - acting in the best interests of the company and upholding company standards

Costs of Not Providing a Safe Working Environment

Email is now the medium of choice for sharing gossip and chatting about co-workers. It has also become the preferred means of bullying, harassing or airing prejudices against co-workers. In the past these types of incidents happened during informal conversations or corridor/canteen chats. Today, these incidents are occurring through corporate email – creating a trail of evidence. Thus email increases employers' exposure to legal risk in this area.

The legal and peripheral costs of not providing a safe working environment can be substantial. In many cases, employees have sued their bosses for failing to protect them from offensive content, harassment or discrimination.

Occurrences of these types of inappropriate email communications are preventable through the implementation of an email monitoring system, supporting corporate policies and through user education. By not taking these preventative measures, the company is leaving itself wide open to repeated email abuse which may also incur additional costs, such as:

Legal fees
Time spent researching and engaging in legal procedures
Being investigated by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office
Distraction of other employees
Loss of productivity as employees leave
Recruitment costs for replacement employees
Training and ramp-up costs for new employees
Loss of reputation and good will for the organisation

Maintaining Legal Compliance & Regulatory Compliance - Reducing Liability Risk through effective and legal Email Monitoring in the Workplace

When an incident of email abuse occurs, the employer's legal position is stronger if they have established clear written policies about the acceptable use of resources such as email. Requiring staff to acknowledge a company policy on harassment and inappropriate use of resources is a key part of meeting safe workplace obligations and mitigating legal risk.

An Acceptable Use Policy is only part of the Solution

Having an Acceptable Use Policy is not enough - the policy must be supported with user education, consistent communication and reinforcement, and an effective method of monitoring and enforcement. Enforcement is normally provided by an email monitoring and email filtering technology.

There are two very important reasons to use email monitoring technology to enforce corporate acceptable use polices:

Using this technology can demonstrate that the company has taken all reasonable and practical steps to prevent incidents of harassment, defamation, or exposure to offensive material. If an incident ever does occur, having a written Acceptable Use Policy for email usage, backed up by technology enforcement, provides an important part of a legal defence, or even a complete defence in some circumstances.
Perhaps more importantly, email filtering solutions can often interdict these events – preventing them from occurring in the first place. Use of profanity or derogatory language can be blocked, preventing incidents of harassment or bullying and adult-image content in emails can be blocked, preventing exposure to inappropriate email content.

By intercepting potential policy breaches, email filtering technology can help to reduce, or even eliminate, the legal risks arising from incidents, with all the associated direct and indirect costs.

People & Process is the rest of the Solution

However, interception of suspicious email messages is also very time consuming and is a manual process. The resources needed to review every suspicious email comes at a cost to the organisation – see example of email assessment costs – but this cost would still be a fraction of the combined costs of legal litigation and damages to company brand/reputation if these preventative measures have not been put in place correctly.

In order to maintain legal compliance in the proper use of an email monitoring or email filtering system, the following activities must have been fully completed:

Create and verify your Acceptable Use Policy with your legal team so that this corporate policy document fully complies with UK law and the recommended guidelines set out by the UK Information Commissioner when monitoring email communications at work.
Publish your Acceptable Use Policy that clearly details to ALL your email users what is and what is not acceptable when communicating over your corporate email system.
Implement a process to make sure that every email user has acknowledged in writing that they fully understand, agree with, and will comply with, the Acceptable Use Policy.
Your organisation has defined, verified, documented and implemented its internal procedures, policies and staff resources to support email monitoring technology and back-office activities. This will include user training as well as the necessary systems administration duties to manage the email monitoring system.

Using Dicontas to reach the Solution

Dicontas can help your organisation to:

Reduce your email monitoring costs by outsourcing the "painful" people-intensive process of having to review every suspicious email message.
Further enhance your organisation’s ability to legally demonstrate that the company has taken all reasonable and practical steps to prevent incidents of harassment, defamation, or exposure to offensive material.
Streamline the email monitoring administration processes to make the use of email monitoring truly plug'n'protect - not plug'n'reject.
Leave the assessment of suspicious email content up to the experts who assess suspicious content day-in, day-out, for many clients.
Eliminate the risk of exposing your staff to potentially defamatory content and adult-rated image materials during the assessment process.
By outsourcing the assessment process to Dicontas, no inappropriate materials will have the chance to enter your internal email system from external email sources.

Dicontas provides a centralised (outsourced) service that fully complements the use of email monitoring and email filtering technology within any organisation.

Quote of the Day...
There is no such thing as a false positive when you use Dicontas.

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