Employer reading emails without consent.

Grumpy_chap

OrbitHeadache said:

Why would anyone use work email address for personal use? 

happyc84 said:

sorry my post was about a company reviewing the work that was done on the company laptop, then saying that the person was not productive enough, nothing about using company email.
As I said there was no written policy about the employer reviewing work on laptop without consent.

prowla said:

Erm, the thread title is:

Employer reading emails without consent.

Well, that can all be consistent, and aligns with the OP:

happyc84 said:

Hi, The company I work for are reading emails from Employees and are taking action against some of the staff, saying that they were working from Home and not doing enough work, this is from looking at their work laptop.

Do they need to tell the staff that all activity is being monitored. They didn't complete a agreement during on-boarding so interested to see if this has happened in your work place.

The individual might not be using company e-mail for private purposes, just the employer is assessing the volume (and quality?) of output from the individual and then determining that there is not enough benefit being achieved. 

This assessment of output seems to include some remote interaction / monitoring of the work laptop and the question, therefore, was whether that remote monitoring needed to have been pre-notified to the individuals concerned.

Others have provided information that, apparently, such monitoring does need to be pre-notified. 
The OP seems to think there has been no pre-notification.
It is not clear whether there would be a catch-all note in the employment contract, handbook, IT policy or such like.

FWIW, the focus on the monitoring of work output and whether it was pre-notified seems as though it may well not be the most appropriate concern to be raising.
The employer has indicated that an individual has not achieved the level of output that is required - how the employer assessed that is secondary to the validity of the assessment. 
With our without e-mail / laptop monitoring, the employer will be aware of the level and value of output from each individual.
The e-mail / laptop monitoring only serves to aid the employer in assessing whether the low rate of output is linked to the individual shirking or a training requirement or other contributory cause.
Maybe, this is where the individual concerned should focus their effort - demonstrating how their individual output has been at or above average for the team...

Smithcom

Bobbobbobingalong said:

Smithcom said:

I think that the starting place should be - To what extent has the employee been (allegedly) slacking.   1 personal email a day or 100?     Has their behaviour been reasonable?  

There is surely an implied contractual term between any employer and employee that the employee will spend much of their working day, well...working

Therefore, regardless of the presence or absence of a clause to confirm that the employer can monitor activity on the work computer (which I agree may amount to a Data Protection breach), I would imagine that there still may be grounds for disciplinary action if the implied contractual term has been broken.

SC

I'd hazard a guess that it is more than an implied term!

Agreed.

It seems an unpopular view judging by some of the very odd comments on thread, but implied or otherwise, the employee should be working during their contracted hours.

It's no wonder that we have the problems that we have in this country, when the hard of thinking believing that requiring an employee to work during their contracted hours is akin to operating a Victorian work house!!!

SC

Cromwell77

I am going to go against the trend here though things may have changed in the three years since I left an it role.

We specifically allowed email for personal use we did this for a couple of reasons firstly that we had a stronger control over AV abs more importantly and probably effectively any ransom, spam and fishing emails that may have a detrimental effect on our staff and our business. We blocked all mail protocols and webmail sites as it would have been difficulty to guarantee protection of clients IP otherwise. 

Secondly our business could be reactive 24/7 no role was a 9-5 role and if we expected staff to look at our email out of hours it was unfair to not allow them use the mail for personal reasons. 

We had a policy in place that covered monitoring, monitoring would be done where possible for performance only using anonymous data and endeavours would be made not to access personal emails.

 We believed that whilst we may have the right to look at our staffs email and that no doubt somewhere in our policy and their employment contract they allowed us to we also have an obligation to protect the privacy of people at the other end of the email who were not our staff and agreed to nothing. There are also examples of when work email can be used even to contact clients where the business does not have a right to view personal data such  as a member of staff may wish to cancel a client meeting because they are having a medical appointment they do not wish to release to the employer at that point. 

As far WFH we organised this had policy and various tools for monitoring and after extensive monitoring found there were generally two fields people fell into, those who requested and wanted to work from home and those who the company wanted to work from home, closing office etc.

We found all those that worked from home claimed to be more productive.
We found that only those that the company wanted to work from home actually were. 

We noticed that the staff that worked from home usually requested a Friday and that access to the remote system was down  and usually nonexistent after about 2pm with many claiming to have logged in incredibly early again not demonstrated on the server records. There were some from whom any emails sent on a Friday always had “sent from iPhone” on the end, come on guys at least be a little smart and change the sign off. 

However whilst monitoring is a useful tool to obtain proof output should be the real yardstick that is needed and if output is as it should be then whatever else someone is doing should be irrelevant shouldn’t it ?