The results of a recent survey on email monitoring in the UK workplace during 2H2005 are shown below.  Forty two organisations participated.

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Chart 2 shows that over 73% of organisations had 76-100% of their employee base using the company email system.

Chart 3 shows that the majority of organisations (53.66%) limited their employees’ use of the company email system for personal use.  Nearly 88% of organisations permit its employees to use its email system for personal use - this means that the monitoring of email must be carefully aligned to not invade the employees’ right to privacy for personal/private communication.  This poses a real challenge to these organisations in its implementation of an effective and legally-binding monitoring system.

Chart 4 shows that 78.05% of organisations say that email communication was critical to conduct its business activities.  Only 1 of the 42 responding organisations said that there was no current business need for email.

Chart 5 shows that 5.26% of organisations currently do not have an Acceptable Use Policy to cover the use of email within their organisation.

In a separate survey, it has been reported that 83% of companies has such a policy in place (Greenfield and Davis 2002).  The variation in these figures may be caused by the time difference, as more companies may have now implemented this policy, or it may be down to other industry-specific variables.

Chart 6 shows that there was a spread variation on who the respondees (IT management) felt should take control and ownership of the policy.  This implies that organisations have different approaches to who should own this policy.  This approach makes the implementation task more difficult as the general consensus of ownership is not solely dedicated to an individual common job role or department.

Chart 7 shows that over 39% of participants either did not presently know, or had not verified, with their legal representatives, their current Acceptable Use Policy on the legal state of this company document.  This leaves these organisations wide open for future difficulties if a situation regarding email monitoring comes to court or employment tribunals.  IT management must be aware of these potential legal failings.

Chart 8 shows that 15.79% of responding organisations do not make their employees aware of the circumstances of when email monitoring is taking place.  Another 10.53% of respondees (IT management) are unsure whether users are informed of this procedure.  Current UK law dictates that all employees must be told of the full circumstances and specific situations of when email monitoring and investigations will take place. Any organisation abusing this regulation is breaking current UK law.

Chart 9 shows that an astounding 65.79% of organisations would monitor employees personal / private email messages – this is in direct conflict with the RIP 2000 Act that forbids employers to open employees messages that are clearly marked as private – no messages can be monitored that say ‘PRIVATE’ in the beginning of an email subject title.  Any organisation abusing this regulation is breaking current UK law.

10. For what business reasons would your organisation have to put in place an email monitoring system?

The above table provides a comprehensive overview of the importance of the business reasons for the introduction of email monitoring. All bold percentages show the highest reflections of current views of the participants.  All response percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole percentage for ease of reading and comparison.

The highest response level (with 55%) was given to ‘compliance of legal and statutory laws’ as a very important business reason for the introduction of email monitoring.  Security issues came a close second, with ‘random checking’ coming last with the most responses for being not important.

Chart 11 shows that over 71% of IT management (the respondees) felt that email was not currently problematic within their organisation. 

Chart 12 shows that there are different views and assumptions that are present in the minds of different participants, i.e. there is no common perspective on the effects of email monitoring on employee productivity.

Chart 13 shows that only 2.86% of organisations believe that email monitoring improves employee moral, whereas 54.29% of organisations believe that email monitoring decreases employee moral.  This analysis is backed up from other research which has found that employees’ satisfaction with computer-aided monitoring has a large impact on overall job satisfaction (Chalykoff and Kochan (1989).  Whitty believes that monitoring is seen as a constraint on employees’ freedom and individuals should take responsibility for their own actions (Whitty, 2003).

Chart 14 shows that 28.57% of organisations believe that email monitoring improves the quality of work from individual employees.  If emails are being monitored then the employee is forced to comply with company guidelines and to improve their “visible” quality of work which is contained within email messages as management may be monitoring or reading their emails.

“The more that managers monitor productive behaviours, the less that employees perform activities, such as helping others, that facilitate the overall performance of the organization.” (Stanton and Weiss 2000). 

Monitoring may not affect the quality of work per se of an individual employee, but it may affect the overall quality, or collective output, of work at a group- or organisation-level.

Another study reports this from the perspective of the employees that “75% of employees surveyed believed that their work quality had suffered due to electronic monitoring.  Some had linked anxiety, depression, and nervous disorders to the stress induced by workplace monitoring.” (Fairweather, 1999)

This shows an enormous variance in views between that of the employee and of [IT] management (this survey’s participant).

The use of email monitoring may also encourage negative management styles - those managers who follow the ‘Theory X’ management style who believe that ‘workers’ generally dislike work and must be forced to do their jobs, and may use email monitoring to micro-manage their department. (Ariss, 2002)

15. What do you feel are the key inhibitors to the successful management and business capitalisation of the company email system?

Table 15 shows the participants’ opinions of the key inhibitors surrounding email management.  ‘Increasing trends in email noise – viruses and spam’ is the most selected key inhibitor.  Whilst the ‘Lack of necessary IT skills’ is the least probable key inhibitor – some bias may exist in this latter result as IT management (the respondee) may be too close to the problem.

Chart 19 shows that the majority of organisations will be facing increased volumes of email traffic over the next five years. E.g. 45.71% of organisations think that email traffic volume will increase by more than 100%.  This impact will force organisations to either expand current email capabilities of their systems, or be required to introduce other methods of handling this increase of traffic, such as more efficient filtering systems.  This chart does not ascertain why, and in what ways, email traffic will increase in volume.

Chart 20 shows that the majority of organisations felt that current technology and external email services are only slightly improving the contribution to the manageability and security of business email.  This is a window of opportunity for the providers of email systems and services to improve this reflection of them.