Tolley's Managing Email & Internet Use

Lynda Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781136355165
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Email and Internet use is increasingly topical as employers and employees test the boundaries of acceptable use of new communications technology in the workplace. The potential legal liabilities make this a crucial decision-making area for all involved in human resources management.Tolley's Managing Email and Internet Use will provide you with the essential legal guidance and practical advice to establish, implement and enforce a policy for internet and Email use in your workplace. Tolley's Managing Email and Internet Use analyses and interprets (in plain language) the law on monitoring employees' Email and internet activity, the use of confidentiality notices, privacy, harassment and Email interception by employers. It also provides information on the key regulations and guidelines which affect Email and internet policy, including the Human Rights Act 1998, Data Protection Act 1998 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.Tolley's Managing Email and Internet Use is the only practical guide to offer you:
- strategic guidance on implementing, policing and maintaining an effective Email and internet policy
- Current thinking on managing Email and internet use
- Sample policies, disclaimers, rules and procedures to assist in establishing your own guidelines
- A practical approach featuring questions and answers, checklists and case studies
- An accessible read regardless of previous legal experience
- Latest case law from recent cases involving Email and internet policyTolley's Managing Email and Internet Use is a complete reference source for Email and internet policy in the workplace.

1 Uses and Abuses of Communication Systems in the Workplace

Introduction

[1.1]

Employees in today’s workplaces have the facility to communicate quickly and easily with colleagues and outsiders as a result of the advent of modern communications systems such as email and the internet. Although such modern means of communication have brought many benefits, they have also created new problems for employers. Apart from the potential legal liability that employees’ use of email and the internet may create for employers (see CHAPTER 2), there may be a rightful concern about the amount of time employees spend surfing the net, playing computer games, or sending emails to their friends.

Although email, when it was first introduced, was a revolutionary method of communication that vastly increased the opportunities for companies to advertise their products or services, keep in touch with clients and customers, conduct research and inform their employees about a wide range of company-related activities and policies, there are many types of communication for which it is not suitable.

Use of the internet has of course given employees in many organisations almost unlimited access to information on unlimited subject matter. Businesses have gained substantial advantages through the use of web-based communications, such as the opportunity to win new customers, set up closer ties with business partners, keep in touch with employees who are mobile and gain access to a vast source of information. All this has brought many benefits, but along with these, a multitude of problems.

Business Email and Internet Use – What is Beneficial for the Business

[1.2]

The advent of email and internet access has brought immense benefits to businesses and the employees who work for them. The most obvious of these benefits are described below:

Cost Savings

[1.3]

Communication by email is a cost-effective way of sending and receiving information. Because messages and attached documents can be sent to any number of people at the same time, this eliminates the need to print out and send individual packages with the associated postage and packing costs. Messages sent by email to another country can thus save substantial postage costs. In most cases, sending an email costs less than a local telephone call.

There is also a potential cost saving if email messages are retained in electronic format only rather than being printed out in order to form a hard-copy file. This has further advantages for the environmentally-conscious organisation in terms of reducing the amount of paper consumed by the business.

For marketing purposes, advertising a product or service on a website is considerably less expensive than producing a glossy brochure and distributing it to large numbers of potential customers.

Speed

[1.4]

Information and documentation can be sent across the world within seconds, whilst a package sent by post or by courier can take many hours (or days) to reach its destination. Even a long fax can take up to an hour to print out at the recipient’s office location.

Preparing an email is also quicker than writing a letter in that no time is needed to print the document out – the document is sent following the simple click of a mouse.

Time and Place

[1.5]

Long and short documents can be sent by email over long and short distances quickly and easily. Time differences between different countries become irrelevant as the email message can be sent during the sender’s working day irrespective of time zones and then read by the recipient during their own office hours. Businesses can reach their customers all over the world, increasing trade links and expanding markets whereas budgets may not extend to world-wide marketing by any other means. Internet access too can be achieved 24 hours a day from any location with a computer and a modem.

Convenience

[1.6]

Employees can choose when to access their incoming emails and it is open to them to organise their work so that they deal with incoming messages at set times each day, rather than being subjected to continual interruptions by telephone. Email messages can also be accessed remotely, allowing employees opportunities to communicate with their colleagues irrespective of whether they are working in the office, at home or travelling away from home on company business. Similarly, internet access can be made from any computer with a modem, including portable laptop computers, irrespective of the person’s physical location.

Permanent Record

[1.7]

An email message can, if necessary, be printed out to form a permanent record, and even if it is held only on the computer’s hard-disk, this provides a more credible and usable record that someone’s vague recollection of a telephone conversation.

Research

[1.8]

The internet provides unlimited opportunities for companies to conduct research into the business activities of their potential customers and suppliers, to analyse what the competition is doing and to accumulate information on an infinitely wide range of subjects relevant to the business. Much of the information available on the internet is free, or else accessible on payment of a modest fee.

Abuse of Email and the Internet – Problem Area

[1.9]

Despite the irrefutable advantages and benefits to businesses of email and internet access, there are many problems and disadvantages associated with the granting of access to these means of communication to employees. Sending an email has often been compared to sending a postcard – the message is not confidential and may be intercepted or read by someone other than the intended recipient. One of the other major problem areas is potential time wasting and the consequent loss of productivity. These, together with other problem areas, are analysed below:

Time Wasting

[1.10]

The internet can be likened to an endless library containing unlimited information on every imaginable topic, providing an indispensable source of knowledge to employees in every sector of business. Although this can greatly enhance employees’ effectiveness, it can also, because of the sheer volume of available information, be very damaging to productivity. Locating information relevant to a specific query can be a very time-consuming exercise. Surfing the net in particular can involve a lengthy process of entering words and phrases in the search facility which may then produce literally thousands of possible results. Even once these potential web-sites are scanned through and a suitable selection made, the next level of search may still not produce anything useful or relevant.

Loss of productive Time

[1.11]

The distractions of the internet are many, and there is a growing problem for employers of loss of productive time due to employees surfing the net for both legitimate business purposes and personal entertainment purposes. It can be argued that providing internet access is akin to placing a television on an employee’s desk, such is the likely level of distraction. In the case of Franxhi v Focus Management Consultants Ltd [1998] Case No 2101862/98, for example, there was evidence that an employee had visited 150 web-sites during working hours whilst trying to book a holiday. The employee’s dismissal was fair because she had received previous warnings and knew that this type of conduct was considered unacceptable to her employer.

One survey conducted in 1999 (by Infosec, Netpartners and Secure Computing Magazine) estimated that 76% of workers were using company time to search the internet for a new job. The results of the survey (which covered 200 international companies) also suggested that in a company of 1,000 employees, there was likely to be a loss of some £2.5 million a year as a direct result of employees using the internet for non-business purposes. The same survey reported that 50 per cent of workers were using the internet to visit ‘adult sites’. In another survey, conducted the same year by Integralis Network Systems, a company specialising in network security, it was estimated that up to two hours a day were being wasted by employees who used email or surfed the internet for personal purposes. This was estimated to be costing a business with 1,000 employees about £3.9 million. There are thus major practical and cost implications for employers in terms of loss of productive working time.

Downloading material can also be a time-consuming activity, occupying valuable computer access time and running up large telephone bills in the process. Employers should rightfully be concerned about the amount of time employees spend using the internet, and should introduce policies governing such use in order to avoid excessive time-wasting.

Employee Distractions

[1.12]

Email, because of its speed and convenience, has presented employees in all types of organisations with tempting opportunities to send and receive personal and private messages indiscriminately. The world-wide web is crowded with lists of jokes being distributed widely from person to person and from company to company. The total amount of lost working time has been estimated variously as anything from half an hour a day per person up to three hours a day per employee on average.

Computer access can also tempt bored employees into wasting time playing games on screen. Unless the employer has a policy in place governing employees’ use of computer facilities and setting out the parameters, these and other time-wasting activities could cost businesses a great deal of money in terms of lost productivity.

Other Problem Areas

Availability of Inappropriate Material

[1.13]

There is no public body with control over the quality of material that is posted on the internet and there is thus no guarantee that information accessed on a particular site is accurate, reliable, complete or up-to-date. Although the speed with which information can be updated makes the distribution of information via the internet an attractive prospect, it is not uncommon for sites to be abandoned by their creator, thus leaving out-of-date or incorrect information open to anyone who chances upon the site. Employers should be aware of this and take steps to advise their employees to scrutinise all accessed information with a critical mind. Relying on information obtained from unknown and unregulated sources could obviously lead to poor business practices.

It is well known that the internet provides an easy source of pornographic material. Because there are virtually no restrictions on what can be placed on the world-wide web, the transmission of adult and child pornography is widespread.

Individual Attitudes

[1.14]

Although email communication tends to be treated with the same degree of informality as a telephone conversation, it produces a permanent record of any dialogue. Even after an employee has deleted a message from their computer files, it can usually be retrieved because of the way in which computer systems are backed up. An email may also be replicated on several different servers, and its various elements, for example the time and date when it was sent and the subject header, may be retained and pieced together at a later date.

An employer who does not impose minimum standards of professionalism on their employees in terms of how they use email risks damaging their business reputation in the eyes of the outside world. Emails that are sent quickly and without proper thought or care often contain errors of language, spelling or grammar and are frequently constructed without any regard to sentence structure. Additionally, many people have developed the habit of writing emails in a style that is more casual or flippant than the style they would use in a business letter. The result can be that messages become unclear, distorted or ambiguous leading to misinterpretation in terms of content or the conveyance of the wrong tone or attitude. As with all forms of communication, it is not only the cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note About the Author
• Contents
• Table of Cases
• Table of Statutes
• Table of Statutory Instruments
• 1. Uses and Abuses of Communication Systems in the Workplace
• 2. Legal Liabilities Arising From Misuse of Email and the Internet
• 3. Unlawful Harassment
• 4. Confidentiality Issues
• 5. The Employment Contract
• 6. Monitoring Telephone Calls, Email and Internet Use
• 7. The Implications of the Human Rights Act on Employers’ Right to Monitor
• 8. Email and Internet Policies and Guidance Notes
• 9. Introducing New Policies, Rules and Procedures
• 10. Security and Tackling Email and Internet Abuse
• 11. Disciplinary Procedures and Dismissal
• Index