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Colliers' Northern California and Nevada division, with 12 offices and nearly $110 million in sales last year, has no email policy, says Vic Fischer, the division's vice president of information technology. Why not? "I would say it's because the managing partners as a group don't see it as a serious concern. They believe that the brokers know what professional standards are and will behave accordingly. For the most part, I have to say that's true. They really are fairly well behaved as far as email content is concerned," Fischer says.
Even so, he is aware of what could go wrong, and he often suggests instituting an email policy that would cover not only content but also archiving. In the absence of an official archiving policy, Colliers is in the habit of keeping everything. "So it's probably OK. But my view of it is, we should know that it's OK by having a retention policy and enforcing it," Fischer says.
When it comes to the risk of reduced productivity, most companies allow their employees a limited amount of appropriate personal use of email and the Web. They often define "appropriate" to mean nonsexual and nondiscriminatory, because that can help shield a company from sexual and racial harassment suits. But most companies don't define "limited." If companies quantify how many minutes employees may spend on private email and surfing, they've got to track the minutes. It's possible to do that with software, but it's expensive, not to mention confrontational. Most companies would rather accept a small amount of private use of corporate technologies as a cost of doing business and then intervene only when a manager says an employee's productivity is slipping.
But Nancy Flynn, director of the ePolicy Institute, says guidelines that don't define phrases like "limited amount of appropriate use" are too vague to be useful. "To some employees, that may be eight hours a day of looking at porn, and we've had many cases of people spending eight hours a day doing that," she says. Or, as many CIOs told us, some employees spend an inordinate amount of time shopping on eBay or checking private email.
Some companies have tried to outlaw all personal use of company assets, including Internet connections and email. But most don't really expect employees to abide. In fact, Home Interiors relaxed its policy after Boyer argued that it wasn't practical to prevent all personal use. He finds it convenient to use his work laptop for some personal email at home. In light of that, "I'm not completely comfortable saying, 'You can't use this at all'" outside of work, he says. "You're not going to say to someone, 'You can't use the phone for personal business.' People have lives, and they're going to [conduct] part of their lives at work. That's just the reality." Now Home Interiors allows a "modest amount" of personal use as long as it doesn't affect employee job performance and conforms to the other restrictions in the policy.
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