subject: Do Your Employees Understand Your Email Policy? [print this page] An email is a rather time saving as well as inexpensive and easy way of communicating and it is a good business tool but at the same time can pose a threat for its employers. There are email threats like breach of confidentiality, legal liabilities, and loss of productivity as well as damaging the reputation of a company that may cost thousands of dollars, every year. All this makes it necessary for a company to protect itself from outside threats and possible losses by having an email policy that, after being created, is adequately implemented. A convenient method of doing this is to train the employees as well as monitoring their emails through email security software.
A company may face a number of email threats which could be legal threats or just network congestion and some of the important threats from email include legal liability, breaches of confidentiality, damage to reputation, lost productivity, network congestion as well as down time, and email retrieval on court order.
If a company has an email policy in place, it would help secure the company by helping to prevent email threats, stopping any misconducts at the very outset, minimizing the company's liability for actions of its employees and finally, filtering software would check the contents of the employee's emails. Once the need of having an email policy has been established, it follows that the company creates one and the email policy so formulated, should contain the do's and don'ts regarding the email system of the company. The email policy should list all the email risks so that users are aware of the potential harmful effects of their actions.
The email policy must also teach email etiquette as well as writing rules that would ensure that the company's reputation is upheld and it continues to deliver quality customer service. There may also be instructions as to how attachments may be compressed to save bandwidth. The email policy must also state if personal emails are allowed and if so, what would be their extent. It is possible to set limits on the amount of personal emails that can be sent out every day or personal emails need to be stored in separate folders and of course, the email policy would prohibit sending of chain letters as well as mass mailing and also limit or remove completely, certain email attachments from being sent or received. The email policy should contain examples as well clearly define the measures to be taken in case of breach of any of these measures.
An email policy should also not allow wastage of valuable resources and warn users not to engage in non-business activities that are not warranted and which may tie up the network traffic without adequate reason. The policy could also cover usage of newsgroups and newsletters and may require a user to have permission before he or she may subscribe to a newsletter or newsgroup. The policy should also strictly prohibit the use and creation or distribution of offensive material or disruptive messages that may include messages with racially biased and offensive content, gender, sex, sexual exploitation, pornography, religious or political beliefs as well as other objectionable material. The policy may also dictate that emails be deleted after a specified number of days. There could also be rules as well as guidelines that spell out how employees will deal with confidential material as well as trade secrets. When monitoring employee email, the policy should state this and warn employees that there may not be any privacy in anything they create, store, send or receive on the computer system of the company.
The email policy is also available in completed form from vendors who provide ready made email policies for a low cost and it is a viable option for those who do not want to spend extra amounts of money, time and effort and yet want the complete package at a low cost. It will certainly pay back the purchase price many times over and is to be preferred to the long drawn out process of making out an email policy from scratch.
