Re: Screening Outgoing Mail for Content

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry () piermont com>]

"Chris Crozier" writes:
> Apart from the confidentiality/industrial espionage aspect, my informal
> observation in large corporates is that some 70%+ of email by numbers (more
> by volume) is junk: either spam or trivia like jokes and screen-savers. This
> can take up a very large chunk of a corporation's internet bandwidth, but
> that is insignificant as a cost against the time wasted by all recipients
> reading the stuff or loading the latest Hollywood screen-saver. Libertarian
> ideologies are al very well, but many larger companies have systems in place
> to monitor unreasonable phone usage, so why not email?

As a Libertarian, I support allowing companies the right to do
anything they like to their employees as a condition of employment, up 
to requiring that the employees allow themselves to be buggered by
their supervisor every morning.

As a person who used to work within the mainstream corporate world
as a Libertarian, I applaud the decision of most employees to tell
employers who do such things to go to hell. In the end, most of the
good ones do.

I know of a very few large companies who do things like making sure
employees aren't using the phone to call their spouse to say hello or
tell them to pick up the kids early, but most such companies rapidly
lose any decent employees, as decent people don't need to put up with
that sort of crud, especially in a tight labor market. Sure, a company 
can save a whole fifty or a hundred bucks a year -- and lose any
loyalty or dedication the employee might have had in the process, thus 
costing thousands or even more.

I know of a lot of people who refuse to work for one large company I
do some consulting for specifically because the management makes
working there very non-fun. Most people don't work very productively
when they are miserable, so this isn't just the employee's problem.

In general, an employee will be productive or they won't. If they get
their work done, keep 'em. If they don't, fire them. Its easy. Who
cares if an employee wastes half an hour a day checking the Dilbert
web page and sending a quick note to a friend if she's spending three
hours on unpaid overtime anyway, and always gets projects done a week
in advance? If you decide to be "productivity minded" and make sure no
employees are sending jokes to friends, then you'll ony have a
combination of embittered and stupid people working for you who
mindlessly follow nothing but "the rules" and who leave at five on the 
dot every day.

It makes perfect sense in a banking or brokerage environment for
employers to record all outgoing and incoming email so that legal
disputes can be settled quickly -- for the same reason all traders and
brokers have their phones recorded. It does not make sense to spend
time trying to nickle and dime employees to death because of the
horrible "productivity loss" that happens when an employee decides to
check the weather page on the net to see if he'll need an umbrella on
the way home, or to send mail to a friend with information on where
they are meeting for beer after work.

Luckily, that sort of behavior is self punishing.

Perry