E-Mail Policy for Employees

If you provide employees with computers, consider adopting an e-mail policy. There are three main concerns involving e-mail: legal liability (as in the case of an employee e-mailing inappropriate sexual content to other employees); lost productivity (with employee time spent on personal correspondence);

and network congestion (as servers are overwhelmed with spam and other non-work-related correspondence). The company's policy should be clear and comprehensive. You want employees to know that e-mail is only to be used for appropriate business purposes.

Too many times, employees consider e-mail very informal and write things that can later come back to haunt the company (for example, dirty jokes to a coworker, discriminatory statements, and so on).

Here are some guidelines for what your e-mail policy should say:

• E-mail should at all times be professional and courteous.
• E-mail is to be used for business purposes and not for personal reasons.
• E-mail is not private or personal to the sender or recipient and management of the company has access to all e-mail sent to or from company computers.
• All e-mail is company property.
• E-mail must not contain any illegal, libelous, or offensive statements.
• All harassing statements (sexual or otherwise) are prohibited; sexual jokes are also inappropriate.
• E-mail that is deleted may still be able to be retrieved from the company's system.
• Any violation of the company's e-mail policy subjects an employee to disciplinary measures or termination of employment.

Click here for a sample e-mail policy that you can modify to fit the particular circumstances of your business.