An estimated 14 percent of business e-mail is ending up in court, subpoenaed or otherwise introduced into evidence in workplace lawsuits, regulatory investigations, and cases involving discrimination, sexual harassment, and anti-trust claims, among others, according to a new survey by the American Management Association, the ePolicy Institute, and Clearswift.
The three looked at 1,100 American companies to determine 14 percent of those surveyed said they were ordered by courts or regulatory bodies to provide worker e-mails, a jump from a 9 percent figure in 2001.
"In spite of growing scrutiny from courts and regulators, most employers are doing a poor job of managing e-mail business records and preparing for the likelihood of e-mail discovery," the three groups said in a June 17 announcement. "Only 34% of employers have a written e-mail retention and deletion policy in place today."
That, the three continued, was the 2001 figure, twelve months before five Wall Street brokerages were hit with $8.3 million in fines for failure to retain e-mail. "When it comes to strategically managing e-mail business risks and reducing legal liability, business has been slow to learn its lessons," the three said.
Their survey showed average employees spend about 25 percent of their working days on e-mail, with eight percent spending over four hours a day on it. Still, there were encouraging signs, as far as the three surveyors were concerned: 52 percent of employers surveyed monitor e-mail, and three quarters have written policies in place, with 22 percent saying they fired employees for violating e-mail policies.
"Most employers drop the ball when it comes to educating employees about e-mail risks, rules, and responsibilities," says <I>E-Mail Rules</I> co-author Nancy Flynn, who's also the ePolicy Institute's executive director. "While 75% of organizations have written e-mail policies in place, only 48% offer e-policy education to employees, and merely 27% offer e-mail retention/deletion training. On the upside, e-policy training has doubled since 2001, when 24% of companies offered e-policy education to employees."
The three surveyors said using technology to monitor e-mail and control message content has risen since 2001. Over 40 percent of employers surveyed use technology to control e-mail content, compared to 24 percent two years ago. But only 23 percent join technology to education, the surveyors added, establishing rules and policy, training their workers about risks and compliance, and enforcing policies with softwares working with the policy guidelines. And if 90 percent of surveyed employers installed such e-mail monitoring software, only 19 percent use it to monitor in-house e-mail between workers.
Flynn calls that failue a potentially costly oversight. "Off-the-cuff, casual e-mail conversations among employees are exactly the type of messages that tend to trigger lawsuits, arm prosecutors with damaging evidence, and provide the media with embarrassing real-life disaster stories," she said. "The fact that 90% of respondents send and receive personal e-mail at work and 66% of companies lack a policy for deleting nonessential messages, compounds the problem."
So does lost time thanks to e-mail system problems, which the surveyors found was the case with 76 percent of those surveyed. About half of those said they lost half a day to such problems, while 24 percent claimed more than two days lost. Five percent of those surveyed said business was disrupted because of e-mail related lawsuits. And, the surveyors said, 92 percent of those surveyed received spam at work, with 47 percent saying spam was more than 10 percent of their e-mail volume and 7 percent saying spam was over 50 percent of their incoming e-mail.
