Friday, June 1, 2007

E-Mail Not Private Anymore - Beware!

In a recent court case against the company on an arbitrary firing of a key staff member on Christmas Eve, the court stated that the firm "presented only vague and unsupported testimony" and that firm "failed to offer sufficient evidence in the record to establish the Claimant was discharged for misconduct..." (See DC Employment Court Decisions, May 2007)

This was a clear case of the demoralizing atmosphere that has existed since the take-over and has resulted in so many departures. Critical to the case that the company tried to make in the court hearing were a series of employee e-mails. The reading of employee e-mail is denied by management in the hallways, but yet they presented personal staff e-mails as evidence in court. It is clear from the court records that they sifted through staff e-mails trying to uncover 'evidence of disloyalty.' The reaction to this has been predictable. Many employees shifted to their private e-mail accounts for any communication that could possibly be construed as critical of the company. One former senior manager resigned after the gross privacy infringement and wrote the following letter to this blog:

“I understand the corporate reality is that your employer 'owns' your company e-mail address. We would all be well advised to be aware of this and have private address for personal matters. However, I was and am still troubled that the company felt that it could exercise its 'right' to go into email exchanges between employees are a way of drumming up proof to unfairly dismiss an employee. This action was NOT discussed at any senior management meeting and therefore, there was no opportunity for the leadership team to participate in this decision. This action yet again undermined the company's leadership team and made employees even more suspicious of us. Given, in our technical work we where we advocate for human rights and transparency, it strikes me as terribly inconsistent that they don’t practice the same values.”

It is this atmosphere that contributes to the staff defections that are still occurring at the firm.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Incredible. Even though a company can do this, I believe it is rarely done and only in cases of criminal misconduct.