Do people really still not understand the concept of “work” email?

I marveled at this story from last week, which could easily have been from a 1996 archive.

An administrator at St. Philip’s College resigned after an internal investigation found she violated the school’s email policy by sending hundreds of nonwork-related message to co-workers, many of them deemed sexually explicit and racially offensive.

Donna Laird, the now former radiography program director, resigned May 18, according to documents obtained by the San Antonio Express-News through open-records laws.

Laird, who could not be reached for comment, told investigators that she sent the email to “alleviate stress at work.”

Many of the notes included pictures of pets, patriotic slogans and motivational sayings, but others featured semi-nude women, animals having sex or masturbating, foul language, and jokes stereotyping men, women, rednecks and people of all races.

In sending those messages to a group of colleagues, Laird showed “gross disregard” for proper use of her work email account, investigators found.

Seriously? There are still people out there who send that stuff out from their work email address to their coworkers? Didn’t every organization in existence adopt workplace rules that tell employees not to do that back during the Clinton administration? How is it that anyone might think that sending these emails is a good idea in the year 2011?

Yes, yes, Chuck Rosenthal proved that such people still existed as of four years ago. There probably are more like these two still out there. Thankfully, they haven’t worked in my office in a long time. But maybe I’m the one that’s living in the bubble, and this is the way it really is. You tell me: Does your office have a Donna Laird or Chuck Rosenthal in it? I include people who persist in sending innocuous but lame and annoying emails – the “pets, patriotic slogans and motivational sayings” genre – in this classification. Sending from their personal email account to other personal accounts doesn’t count – I’m looking for workplace offenders. If this describes your workplace, leave a comment and let us know.

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One Response to Do people really still not understand the concept of “work” email?

  1. Mark Covington says:

    Surely you work in a different industry than I do. At the construction camp where I work there are *plenty* of those emails circulating around daily. There are emails matching every single category you mentioned above, and I’m know there’s a corporate policy against sending them. I’ve seen them both in our remote office where the ol’ boys network is strong and back at the home office too where the corporate presence is much stronger. Clearly there is no automated system flagging these emails on the corporate server. It’s alive and well here, and likely at several other companies in the industry too.

    I suspect the corporate IT group doesn’t take action to automate detection because the damage to the company from terminating so many people isn’t worth enforcing the rules and they can claim plausible deniability if someone tries to bring a legal case.

    While we’re on the subject, I try pretty hard to keep a firewall between my personal and work email accounts. It’s amazing how many people will use their corporate email account just like a personal one. One of my coworkers doesn’t even have a personal account so they’ll use their corporate email address signing up for ebay alerts, coupon deals, etc. When signing up for a personal email account is both easy and free, it’s a rather silly thing to risk your job over.

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