Personal use of company e-mail: Where to draw the line

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Nowadays, e-mail is a fixture in most workplaces, a useful tool for communication and calendaring. However, most of us also recognize that e-mail can be an enormous work distraction.

For every business-related e-mail in our inboxes, we may have a dozen non-work-related e-mails. Whether a friend’s latest YouTube recommendations or questionable business propositions from deposed Nigerian politicians, non-work-related e-mails negatively affect worker productivity and network performance.

Commonly, employers address these concerns using tools like spam filters and firewalls, and with personnel policies prohibiting personal use of company e-mail. Such policies make sense. The problem is enforcement.

All too often I have worked with companies that prohibit personal use of company e-mail on paper, but allow such personal use of company e-mail in practice. That leads to conversations like this:

Me: “Why are you allowing personal use of company e-mail?”

Them: “We haven’t had a lot of problems with it. We feel it’s good for employee morale. Plus we don’t want the hassle of having to police everyone’s e-mail.”

Me: “Then why do you have a policy prohibiting personal use of company e-mail?”

Them: “… Because you told us to.”

The lesson is that employers need to decide for themselves how to regulate personal use of e-mail, taking into account not only its effect on productivity and network efficiency, but also the company’s culture. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with allowing personal use of company e-mail. But the written policy should reflect the reality of the company’s practices with regard to personal e-mails.

Moreover, even those employers willing to allow such personal use of e-mail will still want to clarify the parameters of such use. For instance, employers will want to preserve their right to monitor and restrict use of the company e-mail system – especially when there is a problem. Employers should communicate their right to restrict e-mail use if it does begin to negatively affect productivity. Employers will also want to make clear that the company e-mail system cannot be used to harass others, disclose confidential information, or engage in illegal conduct.

Also, employers should consider how their e-mail use policies and their no-solicitation policies impact each other. Consider the recent case, The Guard Publishing Company, 351 NLRB No. 70 (Dec. 16, 2007). The National Labor Relations Board, in a 3-2 decision, held that an employer could lawfully prohibit employees from using the company e-mail system for “non-job-related solicitations” – even while the company allowed other types of personal e-mails.

That is to say, the employer allowed employees to e-mail each other about such non-work things as parties, “for sale” notices, and baby announcements. But the employer prohibited using the company e-mail to “solicit or proselytize for commercial ventures, religious or political causes, outside organizations, or other non-job-related solicitations.”

Because the employer had consistently enforced this prohibition, it was able to lawfully allow some types of personal e-mails while restricting personal e-mails it did not desire.

The bottom line? Crafting an e-mail use policy requires an employer to first decide what kind of restrictions it is willing to enforce (and how much and what kind of personal e-mail use it is willing to live with). Looser, but enforceable, restrictions on personal e-mail use are probably better than tighter restrictions that go unenforced.