How to prevent employee abuse of e-mail and telephone
Most people will be tempted to use their organisations’ e-mails and telephones for personal reasons, and infrequent use of those resources is usually tolerated. In fact, any attempt to eliminate this practice is likely to meet with both overt and covert resistance. When employees abuse that privilege, however, action is required. Lost productivity, costs incurred, and the potential for legal intervention demand that you become involved. Here are some prevention and intervention suggestions...
1. Involve employees in developing a policy.
Ideally, every organisation should have a policy on e-mail and telephone usage. Involving employees in developing that policy will encourage their support and make monitoring much easier.
The difficult task is specifying which activities are permitted and which are forbidden. Australian Government guidelines pinpoint the issue:
"It is a matter for each organisation to determine what it considers to be appropriate usage of its system. However, for a company to simply say that all activity must be ‘work-related’ may not provide sufficient clarity. There may be scope for guidelines outlining what type or level of personal use of e-mail, both within the organisation and to other organisations, is appropriate. Obviously, some activities should be specifically prohibited, for example, the use of e-mail to harass, abuse, or defame, disclose information, or transmit pornography.
If an organisation determines that Web usage is to be work-related only, it should clearly spell out what it considers to be work-related and not work-related. The policy also needs to account for the fact that it may not be possible to tell whether a web page is relevant until it has been read, and links to other websites may be misleading."*
The challenge is to devise a policy that clearly establishes ‘reasonable’ usage of e-mail and telephone.
2. Train employees.
Insist on regular ‘housekeeping’ of e-mails. Those no longer required should be ‘binned’. Regular audits of the capacities of your organisation's PCs should be an important function of your IT staff. The need for regular e-mail ‘housekeeping’ should feature at staff training sessions, as should telephone use and etiquette. Make your expectations clear to all employees.
3. Advise employees of all monitoring procedures.
You have a legal obligation to ensure that e-mails are not used as vehicles for offensive materials and do not conflict with policies on sexual harassment and equal employment opportunities. Many options are available today to monitor both e-mail and telephone use. New technologies appear almost daily. Many tools are available, for example, to scan the content of e-mails to filter out pornography, ethnic jokes, and language that could offend and lead to legal actions. Other practices could include charging staff for personal calls, recording outgoing and incoming calls and their destinations, and bluffing. Generally, however, you will find that telling your staff members that, as part of company policy, their calls may be regularly monitored will serve as an adequate deterrent.
