Should big companies ban work email or not?

Introduction

Atos CEO Thierry Breton claims the amount of email pinging around his 50,000-employee company (which is about the size of Apple) is "unsustainable," forcing managers to spend up to 25 hours a week reading and writing emails. He told employees that the company plans to phase out email between colleagues over the next three years. Email will still be used for external communications, but employees will be expected to use collaboration and social media tools instead of email to communicate with fellow co-workers.

Discussion

Employers, especially in the U.S., can get into costly trouble over email — including private messages sent by employees using company computers and network. This makes it prudent for companies to monitor everything you do on your work computer — and how you communicate in particular. Not only are certain web sites filtered out and your other web activity protocoled minutely; all the emails you send and receive are scanned as well. Routinely, but especially if any legal problems can be foreseen, all mail is archived and catalogued.

In 2005, for example, 1 out of every 4 U.S. companies cancelled employment contracts for misusing email according to an AMA/ePolicy Institute survey.

Do Not Use Company Computers for Personal Email

When the company watches your every keystroke, you should as well.

Do not use your company computers, email account and outgoing mail server for private emails.

If you have your work email account set up at home, use a separate account for private messages. Make sure that a private account uses a different outgoing (SMTP) server (typically your internet service provider's) to send mail.

Free email services are reasonably private. Do not use them on company computers or the company network (say, Wi-Fi) for private mail, though.

You cannot expect any privacy for mail that touches company infrastructure: computers, wired or wireless networks or email (SMTP, IMAP, POP, Exchange, Notes) servers.

Outside the U.S., email privacy at work may be different. In EU countries, for example, the situation is almost the opposite: companies can get into trouble monitoring employee communication.

He is not wrong, although the public profile of Atos - by its own estimation Europe's second largest IT services provider after IBM - is remarkably low for a company with annual revenues of €8.7bn (£6.7bn) and 78,500 employees. Even given Atos was the lead IT partner for the 2012 London Olympics. The business is divided into consulting and technology services, systems integration, managed services, high-tech transactional services and Atos Healthcare.

Since Menais joined from Accenture in September 2011 where he was director of legal services, he has led the transformation of Atos' legal department, including a 'bottom up' redesign by staff that has also seen the introduction of legal process outsourcing. Menais was brought in following Atos' buyout of Siemens IT Solutions and Services in the summer of 2011, and has been given the task of creating a global, cohesive legal team. As a result of the merger the legal team almost doubled to 150, ...