Taking The Lead

Educate your employees on the legal aspects of e-mail.

The advent of e-mail has provided businesses with a quick, easy, inexpensive way to communicate with customers, colleagues and vendors worldwide. But along with these benefits come risks: Used incorrectly, e-mail can result in personal and professional embarrassment, lost business and costly litigation.

Consider these possible scenarios: A questionable joke gets forwarded to someone who interprets it as harassment; critical comments about an employee accidentally land in that person's e-mail box; or confidential competitive data is inadvertently attached to a message sent to a vendor.

As the number of people who have access to e-mail continues to grow, it's becoming increasingly important to educate everyone about the dos and don'ts of communicating in the networked business world, says Will Hipwell, a marketing project manager with American Media Inc., a West Des Moines, Iowa, firm that produces how-to products for corporate training. American Media has developed a training video, "No Privacy: Legal Issues in E-mail," to help with this process. Among the critical points the video makes are:

• E-mail messages should be treated as public information, not private communications.

• E-mail should be regarded as a permanent form of communication. Even though users delete messages, copies are stored in multiple places in a computer system and can often be retrieved later in an audit or by court order. Messages and documents can be stored for years on backup disks or tapes and can be introduced as evidence in legal actions over anti-trust, discrimination, termination or copyright infringement.

• E-mail should never be used to discuss sensitive issues, such as employee performance, suspicions of misconduct, salary levels or other confidential topics.

• Once you send an e-mail message, you have no control over where else it might go. Never write anything in an e-mail message that you wouldn't want the entire world to see.

• Don't use the company's business e-mail system for your personal correspondence.

American Media's video sells for $595; a $40 preview video and short-term rentals are also available. Call (800) 262-2557 for more information.

This article was originally published in the December 1998 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Taking The Lead.