E-mail: the perils and the pleasure

Your work e-mail may be "free", but it could still come at a cost. JOHN NAUGHTON and JULIE MIDDLETON report.

The days when bond traders and media power-dressers were pleased to find white powder in envelopes are apparently over.

As the backlog of snail-mail mounts in the United States, New Zealand authorities come down hard on anthrax hoaxers and we eye posted items suspiciously, the attractions of e-mail for work communications become daily more obvious.

After all, the worst thing you can catch from e-mail is a virus that wipes your hard disk and/or sends pornographic messages to everyone in your address book. Embarrassing but not fatal.

And you can avoid many of these pitfalls simply by not using Microsoft's e-mail software. So stand by for a huge increase in e-mailing.

Problem solved? Um, not entirely. You may not catch anthrax from e-mail, but it can seriously damage your working life.

In fact, you might argue that electronic messaging is already a monster that is out of control.

New Zealanders spend nearly two hours (111 minutes) a day using e-mail, says an April study by consulting company Rogen International. Ahead of us are Australia and the US on 122 minutes and Singapore on 133 minutes.

IT types, unsurprisingly, spent most time on-line (138 minutes); those coming in lowest were healthcare workers (102 minutes).

And, of course, most of them are at work at the time.

The same study, which canvassed 1400 senior and middle-level executives, found that employees were sending an average of two e-mails daily but receiving 30, which suggests a scary amount of incoming, unsolicited or just plain unnecessary missives.

Rogen head Neil Flett says: "More than 30 per cent of e-mails received by employees are not directly relevant to their job, and this impacts on an organisation's bottom line."

That is the most important insight that companies might inculcate in employees: just because e-mail is apparently free to them, that doesn't mean it's cheap.

See it as an extraordinarily expensive medium. It consumes the scarcest resources of all - people's time and attention. Everyone has heard stories of people dreading holidays simply because of the mountain of electronic messages that will await their return to work.

But those tales you think are urban legends about e-mail escapades leading to sackings might well be true.

Auckland Employment Tribunal member Bill Hodge says the cases involving alleged e-mail abuse that make it to the courts are just the tip of the iceberg.

For every case that comes up in the law reports, he estimates, a further 90 are floating around unreported.

Employment disputes involving e-mail are complicated when e-mail content might be seen to breach employers' responsibility to provide a safe environment.

The latest e-mail case from the Employment Court concerned Methanex technicians Niki Allerton and John Offord, who were sacked for handling, respectively, large amounts of porn and family history data via their work e-mail addresses.

This was despite a policy asking for personal e-mail to be kept to a reasonable amount and, at one point, a company-wide amnesty during which all unauthorised software and data were to be deleted, no questions asked.

The two were sacked in February last year. The court reinstated just Offord.

In another case, in 1997, the court backed the sacking of three public servants - Taini Eruera Takahi Clarke, Blair Nathan Tempero and Vaitogi Tasesa Tauveo.

The trio used the e-mail systems belonging to the then New Zealand Employment Service to send what the judge termed "hundreds of offensive messages", many of them anti-women.

Again, this was despite training that specifically included a ban on explicit language.

More crucial than having a company internet and e-mail policy, says Hodge, is for managers to be seen to set an example by sticking to it.

He says that most defences in e-mail-related employment stoushes involve one of two lines: either "if there was a policy, I didn't know" or "there was a policy but everyone ignored it". Too rigid an e-mail policy will fuel the latter.

But even e-mail behaviour outside the office can end a career. The Warehouse sacked long-serving Christchurch assistant branch manager Terence Hodgson in 1998 after he was convicted on four child porn charges.

Police found 106 files on his home computer involving children and bestiality, incest and sexual violence.

Hodgson, then a married 35-year-old with two children, had mentioned upcoming court charges to his supervisor but watered down the details.

After his conviction, The Warehouse said that such behaviour went against everything it represented, which justified his dismissal - and the court backed its move.

Another downside of e-mail is the power it gives employers to snoop on their workers' communications. Lawyers are beginning to see the lucrative possibilities of trawling through e-mail archives in legal proceedings, because managers often reveal things in internal e-mail conversations that they would never voice in public.

Microsoft's e-mail archives were the most potent weapon wielded by the United States Department of Justice in the anti-trust suit brought against the company.

And defamation laws now reach deep into cyberspace. New Zealand's first internet defamation case, in September, proved that there is no immunity from prosecution, despite the apparent anarchy of the web.

The former chief executive of internet registry Domainz, Patrick O'Brien, got $42,000 in damages from Alan Brown, who made defamatory remarks to an internet news group, an e-mail list and a website.

But the strangest thing about the e-mail phenomenon is that most of those who complain about it seem to regard the electronic torrent as an irresistible force rather than a phenomenon that can be managed.

They talk wistfully of finding technological solutions - for example, intelligent software that can "read" messages and make judgments about their importance - when they could make inroads into the problem by using just commonsense.

How? Well, they could start, for example, by teaching employees procedures for coping, such as setting aside half-an-hour at the beginning and end of the working day for e-mail.

The Rogen study, which aimed to measure the effectiveness of e-mail and face-to-face communication at work, found that 85 per cent of those questioned agreed that e-mail had improved company communication, even if it created more work.

But big news, whether bad or good, was best delivered face to face.

"The desire for employees to use a face-to-face communication for a number of important decisions is quite encouraging in the on-line world," says Gerald Goldhaber, the head of the research company that crunched the numbers.

So the first question to ask before hitting the "compose" button would seem obvious: is this e-mail really necessary? And another: How would I feel if it ended up on the front page of the Herald?

British spin doctor Jo Moore forgot to ask that very question an hour after a hijacked plane hit the first of the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11.

An adviser to Britain's Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers, she sent an e-mail that read: "It is now a very good time to get out anything we want to bury."

The e-mail was leaked to the press. Indignant calls for her resignation were swift. But worse than the official reprimand she received was facing journalists to apologise.

"I cannot take back, no matter how I wish I could, this terrible error of judgment," she said.

"It is something I will have to live with for the rest of my life."

The moral? Careless messaging costs working lives.

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