Re: Issue & Argument: Please critique
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10 Mar 2010, 14:24
ESSAY QUESTION:
“Companies should be prohibited from monitoring e-mail correspondence of their employees, since this policy destroys the atmosphere of trust and undermines employee morale.”
From your perspective, how accurate is the above statement? Support your position with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.
YOUR RESPONSE:
Although, if the companies are prohibited from monitoring the email correspondence, the atmosphere of trust and employee morale may be strengthened, I feel that the companies have certain limitations, and certain rights to monitor these emails. I disagree with the statement that companies should be prohibited from monitoring email correspondence of their employees as it destroys the trust and undermines employee morale because of many reasons, three of the most important as follows.
Firstly, the email is becoming a increasing form of communication. Any person who regularly uses a computer at least reads or writes an email every day. In a company or a corporate environment, email serves as a highest means of communication. People, in some cases, prefer to send emails to their colleagues to talking to them over the phone or in person. The reason is that, he/she has a proof of this communication if someone questions the employee later. In corporate offices, emails such as the one described, serve more than communication. It serves as official documentation. As a result, emails are becoming increasingly popular in a company.
Having described the purpose of emails, I will try to describe the cons associated with the emails. Some companies allow emailing outside of the company in order for their employees to communicate with their clients, vendors, etc. There are many employees who misuse this privilege by sending emails to friends, and families. This misuse sometimes result in a waste of time. Sometimes, some employees email to their friends outside work large files such as their holiday pictures. This wastes precious bandwidth and may impact the work of other employees. Some employees go a step further in the misuse and email to their personal email in-boxes copies of confidential information such as the companies budgets, the companies' mailing lists etc. This is a very serious problem for the company if confidential information is being leaked from its doors. Due to the above mentioned reasons, it is very important for the companies to monitor the emails of their employees. If not within the company, the company must monitor all the emails going out of the company.
There is one more serious impact if the companies do not monitor their emails. Some employee who might be trying to file a lawsuit against its own employee may send information from its company which is against the federal laws such as information pertaining to the military, or to people they do not know, or inappropriate videos or pictures that may be circulating on the Internet. If this happens, the recipient may wish to sue the company as the email is coming from the company and the company is responsible for all of its employees. As a result, the company's reputation is at stake. This may even happen within the company which suggests that the company may in some cases want to monitor internal email correspondence as well as opposed to what was said in the last sentence of the previous paragraph.
Finally, even if the company is monitoring the email correspondence, the employees who are corresponding according to the 'correspondence terms and conditions' set by the company has nothing to worry about and doesn't have to feel that his/her trust is being suspected or his morale is being undermined.
Due to the above mentioned reasons, it is better for a company to not be prohibited from monitoring email correspondence of its employees.