E-Mail Surveillance At Workplace

The popularity of Internet worldwide has transformed the way individuals and companies carry out their daily transactions. Electronic mail a.k.a. email is a subset of the big Internet world. It is a communication facility that is slowly replacing the conventional mail. Its advantages had pursued individuals and businesses to adopt email facility as part of their daily life. However, many media headlines, including the court of law judgments, have highlighted the risk and the danger of emails facility at work. The way it has been misused, abused and violated has jeopardized the employer and has placed the relevant parties at risk. This and other reasons have led the management to monitor the emails usage by its employees. This paper examines the need for monitoring email usage at the work place. It looks into the extent of misuse of the facility by employees in general and with reference to Tenaga National Engineering and Consultancy (TNEC), Malaysia in particular. The paper also sheds light on employees’ perception on email monitoring. A well-defined organizational policy on email surveillance is the need of the hour, proposes the paper.