Watch What You Say…and Write

Nearly three out of 10 employers surveyed by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute had fired workers for e-mail misuse. The most-cited reasons included violation of company policy (64%), inappropriate or offensive language (62%), excessive personal use (26%) and breach of confidentiality rules (22%)

How are employers catching e-mail abusers? Of the 43% of companies in the survey that monitored e-mail, 73% used technology to automatically monitor it and 40% assigned an individual to manually read and review it.

The survey found that general computer monitoring took many forms, including:

Tracking content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard (45%)

Reviewing computer files (43%)

Monitoring external blogs to see what is being written about the company (12%)

Monitoring social networking sites (10%)

Source: 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey, American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute, www.amanet.org and www.epolicyinstitute.com.