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The rise in e-mail and Internet use has led to a policy-writing frenzy. But firms should also trust staff, asks Martin Rosner
Without doubt the most important new HR policies for the millennium cover Internet and e-mail abuse.
Sordid stories about sending personal e-mails and downloading disgusting material now hit the news headlines at regular intervals. If you read the papers, more employees are being sacked for this than anything else.
But is it all hype or is there a real danger to the security of our organisations and the morals of our staff? For years, we have been turning a blind eye - at least in most cases - to personal telephone calls to book our holidays or buy our car insurance, using company post to send a private letter and social chats across a cup of coffee. We are even told that such chats are essential for our sanity and are good for our business. They all involve company time and company expense in one form or another.
So why is it that e-mail or booking a holiday on the Internet are so uniquely different? Why does e-mail cause us to rewrite our rule books and fear all sorts of dastardly deeds to undermine the security of our organisation?
There have been some high-profile cases that demonstrate the dangers of e-mails and the unacceptable use of the Internet. But we don’t vet every letter that goes out, nor do we generally monitor every phone call.
The big benefit of all the publicity has been to highlight how easy it has become to monitor what we write and to whom.
Staff now know that the computer, an essential part of our working life, also keeps the secrets that we would prefer our managers not to know.
We also know how easy it is to “protect our backs” by copying things to everyone under the sun and months later dramatically produce the evidence when someone claims they did not know about something. I have done the same myself when the unions claimed they hadn’t been consulted about a new policy and I was able to produce the e-mail which “proved” that consultation had taken place.
Clearly, the worst excesses of the Internet and e-mail - just like the abuse of the company telephone system - cannot be tolerated by any organisation and staff who a
