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One-Third Of Companies Monitoring Email

Posted by timothy on from the good-thing-it's-the-weekend dept.

dotpavan writes "While studies have shown that spying on workers tends to make them less productive, that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools. 43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails. This seems like quite a waste. While there are some times when it makes sense to monitor emails (or it's required by law), most of the time, this seems like a complete waste of money. Not only are you upsetting workers and decreasing productivity, the benefits are pretty hard to spot. The number of "problem" emails tends to be incredibly low. If someone really wants to send out inappropriate emails, they're going to figure out some other way to do so, such as via a free webmail account somewhere. Yet, the companies are buying up expensive tools and hiring staff to watch just in case they catch the one or two problematic emails that go over the corporate network."

3 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. What's really fun... by MrRage · · Score: 5, Informative

    is that you can legally get access to the sent and recieved email of graduate students, faculty, and staff at state runs schools under some open information act. Yeah, it's happened in my department.

  2. Paper seriously misquoted by standards · · Score: 5, Informative

    "While studies have shown that spying on workers tends to make them less productive, that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools. 43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails.

    The "study" referenced does not address eletronic monitoring of employees.

    The paper is about trusting employees to work from home and other "remote" locations. Evidently, Microsoft doesn't feel that employers should feel the need to physically watch over their employees - perhaps because remote office work could be beneficial to Microsoft's bottom line.

    To claim that this paper is an academic study referring to the negative aspects of corporate electronic monitoring is way off base. Instead, it smells like a Microsoft whitepaper promoting Microsoft products within UK employees' homes.

  3. TFA by Panaphonix · · Score: 5, Informative

    that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools.
    Why not link to the source for your source (login)? The ITFacts.biz story got it wrong anyway: "33% of US companies monitor employees' e-mail" is wrong--the direct quote was "Almost 33 percent of 140 North American businesses..." You and ITFacts were off wrt the number and the sample. Oh, and the Tribune article was merely a syndicated column, using data from a nearly year-old study. Not exactly news. Where did I find that out? Look, it's ITFacts.biz! Yep, TFA was a double post.

    Let's continue because we are not done fixing your post:
    43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails.
    Wrong. It's "more than 43%" of companies with over 20,000 employees (not 43% of monitoring companies), according to the study. The one-third figure expands the sample to include all companies.

    It is also worth noting that the study in question was sponsored by ProofPoint, which in fact sells monitoring software. So you could say that Forrester had a financial interest in high-balling the figure (which it appears they did, with all this "almost 33%" business).