As if corporate IT departments don’t have enough to worry about, their staff is often on the receiving end of employee abuse. Most companies have clearly stated rules of proper business conduct documented in form of an employee manual or other written HR policy.

The rules covering electronic communication typically spell out the terms of use, appropriate and permissible content and usage limits or restrictions. These rules are driven by HR and business policy and more often follow specific regulatory and compliance requirements that must be monitored and enforced.

What is somewhat surprising is that the monitoring and enforcement function, in many cases, is the responsibility of corporate IT, often without being given the proper authority to act on violations. Michael Osterman of Osterman Research recently wrote about this issue in his blog, quoting this particular incident:

“One of the panelists in a session on content filtering and encryption told us about her experience when responding to someone who had violated a company policy on inappropriate content being sent through email. This panelist, a senior IT manager, reminded the individual about the corporate policy, to which the offender replied, “Bite Me!”. The individual who offered this less-than-appropriate response is no longer employed at that company.”

Anybody who has ever worked in IT can probably relate and may recall similar encounters. The issues of contention surrounding email are plentiful:

  • Exceeding of message size and mailbox storage quotas,
  • Emailing of inappropriate content,
  • Email overuse for personal purposes,
  • Illegal message forwarding, and
  • Other disruptive user activities.

Companies are well advised to remove IT from the thankless role of the policy messenger. It leads to employee burnout and can create a hostile work environment.

Instead, regulatory and HR violations should be routed automatically to the appropriate business manager with the proper authority to enact on the rules.

The same applies to core IT policies such as quotas. Rather than having IT chase individual offenders, firms should implement technology solutions that can automatically enforce IT policy while offering alternatives that enable employees to get their work done.

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