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I hate monitoring employees work communications. For me, the only reason I would take a peek is only if an employee gave me a reason to. And plenty do.

As an employee, what you do on your own time is your business, but when you are using work internet or telephone, unless specifically prohibited by law in your area, employers can and do monitor your communications.

There are good reasons for monitoring employees, like to maintain quality, make sure the business is in compliance, etc. There are bad reasons to monitor like, the boss is bored or just nosy.

Personally I feel that everyone is entitled to privacy and that’s fine, until an employee does something stupid, and some do.

Some employers will routinely monitor email, surfing and telephone calls. Some are bored and some are just damn nosy. The argument about monitoring for quality assurance goes only so far.

• Employee Example: One time we were looking for a particular employee on another floor. We were going to lay him off for repeatedly saying inappropriate things to female co-workers.

  The HR guy pressed the speaker phone and hit the code to tap into the line to see if he was at his desk. Here is what we heard.

  “Daddy, can’t you please come home and go sledding with me. Mommy says you can?”

  “Sorry, not now, I’ve got to work.”

  Child’s voice, “Daddy, I love you, pleaseeeeeee?”

  “Hang up!”, I said. Long pause and feeling like crap about the situation. “Well I suppose the good news is that he can go sledding with his kids now.”

The Boss Does Monitor Your Work Communications

As an employee you would hate to know that your boss can intercept chats, listen to calls and read your work communications, but they can and do.

Some employers do it because they are jerks, the same people that drilled the hole in the bathroom wall to peek. But most employers do it because some employee before you was an idiot.

Technology today makes it even easier to monitor you.

Surfing Problems

A couple of examples in the past reinforced why establishing some limits on surfing at work are needed. Both employees allowed surfing to overshadow their work but the outcome was different.

• Employee Example: Rumor had it that he was surfing more porn that coding. After a two minute look at the traffic logs and the sites visited, he was in the U.S. on an H1B work visa for us, it was a cinch to spot the traffic since not many employees were surfing porn in his native language. The logs supported the allegations.

  So I had to have that employee talk that most bosses hate, about your personal life and habits. After an uncomfortable few minutes I felt very confident that he got the point.

  Apparently he didn’t because he walked out of my office, back to his desk and started surfing porn immediately and I mean instantly. A couple of more talks latter and offers for help with his non-working addiction and he was history.

• Employee Example: Same sort of situation but this time with sports scores and team information. I had a chat with the employee and he walked straight back to his desk to check scores. I walked by on my way someplace else and saw him back on the sports site. I blurted out, “Dude, give me a break”. He explained that he was confused and not sure if I wanted him to stop surfing today or begin not surfing scores tomorrow.

Email Issues

Employee abuse of email is a problems some times as well. The first issue is to glance at new employee emails is to see how they are communicating with the outside world on behalf of your organization. You would be surprised how many seemingly intelligent people can’t type a coherent or professional email.

• Employee Example:The worst case was a guy that came highly recommended but it became instantly obvious that he had some issues that caused his communications to be jumbled and full of misspelled words. At least use the spell check.

  When I asked him to come talk to me about his emails he refused to enter my office and would not go past the doorway. I guess he thought if he didn’t actually enter my office that our conversation wasn’t “official”. We had the chat in the doorway. I offered to pay for private tutors, classes, special training, etc. but for whatever reason he refused and quit.

But some employees take email issues way beyond reason and commonsense. Take the employee below that on one given day accounted for 90% of our corporate email traffic by total message size (MB) and I had 70 employees!

• Employee Example: Thanks to one adventurous and active employee I actually had to go and search out sex acronyms for business reasons. Now I can’t get them out of my head.

  You see, I once had this employee years ago that was having several affairs and selling term papers from his work email address. Smart guy, a lawyer in fact, but checked his commonsense at the door evidently.

  I’m not quite sure how it was brought to my attention but I had to do something I hated, look at the email logs to see what he was doing. The claim was that it was not work.

  After looking, basically his day was, porn, porn, sex talk, arranging hookups, selling term paper, porn, sex talk, work, what happened last night, threesome talk, etc. I went to print out one email and it would up being 400 pages long with all the forwards, attachments, replies, and so on. There is only so much chocolate lover, I want you to do, I want to do to you stuff you can actually read and still look the employee in the face. I think I read the first 25 pages and then it all blurred. I got the point and there was no need to read further.

  I can’t even list all the acronyms I learned here but let me assure you, it was an education.

  So here is my short list of acronyms that I came across while researching this that I had no clue what they meant. Some surprised me, some shocked me, and some just made me feel stupid trying to find the right answers.

Email and Chat Acronyms

POS - Parents over shoulder.
IMHO - In my humble opinion.
OMG - Oh my God.
OWO - Oral Without.
PIR - Parents in room.
P911 - Parent alert.
PAW - Parents are watching.
PAL - Parents are listening.
MorF - Male or female.
SorG - Straight or gay.
TD2M - Talk dirty to me.
IWSN - I want sex now.
NIFOC - Nude in front of computer. (Be sure to include that in business memos.)
GYPO - Get your pants off.
KFU - Kisses for you. (Aw, that’s sweet and a whole lot less creepy than most.)
MOSS - Member of same sex. (And all this time I thought it was that green stuff outside.)
CIM - Cum in mouth.
ATM - Automated teller machine but also means ass to mouth. (Explains high fees at money machine.)
BCD - Behind closed doors. (Refers to intimate activity that occurs in private or credit card marketing plan.)
BJ - Blowjob or the name of a chain of wholesale stores in the U.S.
CL - craigslist.org
CMT - Certified Massage Therapist or Country Music Television.
DDG - Drop dead gorgeous.
DIY - Masturbation or do it yourself, typically home improvement.
FOB - Fresh off boat.
GFE - Girlfriend experience.
J353 - Oral stimulation and deep tongue penetration of the female’s anus by the male.
MILF - Mom I’d Like to Fuck. This one got used a lot in emails.
SLGHCSWAP - So little game he can’t score with a pro.
NALOPKT - Not a lot of people know this.

Chats Can Also Be Dangerous at Work

Technology allows employers to intercept chats on work networks, although I never did that. However the best chat story was when an employee left his desk and his chat on.

• Employee Example: His manager went into his office to find him for something and the chat box dinged, she looked, and the message said “Does your bitch boss know?”

  She couldn’t resist and typed “What?”

  The answer came back “OMG You know, that your grandfather really didn’t die and you lied to take funeral leave so you could go to the beach orgy.”

  The story did not have a happy ending but then again this was the same employee that would jog around the building parking lot at lunch instead taking a run though the neighborhood, because he did not want to get lost.

Personal Call Problems

Telephone calls from work cost money. Employers often pay per minute for local calls, for long-distance calls and even more for international calls. Employees do routinely abuse the phone and employers have easy access to call reports, time on call, repeated numbers called, etc.

• Employee Example: My favorite employee personal call story was about an employee that was leaving the company and at the same time it came to our attention that she was making a lot of personal calls. I decided to let it slide since it was her last week.

  The staff had organized a party to say good-bye and as we all stood, enjoying the food, she was back at her desk on the phone. The party for her was almost over by the time she came in. We all hugged and said good-bye.

  At the end of the month the phone bill arrived. All the time we were waiting for her with her good-bye party she was on an a very, very expensive international call to her mom. Nice.

Top Five Tips to Not Get Your Emails, Chats, Calls or Surfing Monitored At Work

1. Exercise care to not allow your personal life to take over your work life. Your company has hired you and pays you to perform a task, not pay for you to have a personal life with better access to communications.
2. An email here or there or a quick chat is fine for most bosses but just imagine how much of a day is lost to some emails, some chats, some private phone calls and surfing. It can easily add up to a couple of hours a day. That pisses your boss off and gets you noticed and you don’t want to be on the radar.
3. Don’t call the same number over and over from your work phone. It’s so easy to spot and makes your boss go, “hum?”
4. Don’t overload the mail server with huge attachments or loads of emails to email addresses like “thisbitchbites”, “ilovetonibble”, “dome1moretime’ or “johnnyxxx”. Those kind of email addresses might be cute but when you are scanning the logs, they stand out becuase they make you laugh. They become memorable.
5. You don’t need to worry so much about deleting your surfing records from your local machine, because they can be logged and captured at the firewall or some other device before it ever reaches your desk. Check the scores, take a peak, whatever, just get back to work, please.

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Steve

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