Employees and Networks

Monitoring Employees on Networks
How does e-mail benefit an organization? Why might an organization want to limit how an employee uses e-mail during work hours? What is an e-mail’s path once it leaves an organization?
E-mail communication can offer an organization a number of benefits. For one thing, communication between clients and employees become much easier, clearer, and faster. E-mails are very effective organizational communication tool, but it has some disadvantages as well. For example, many employees would use their e-mail for personal use instead of business use. Ultimately this decreases productivity and makes the company pass on higher prices to its customers. Another disadvantage of using personal e-mail at work is that a company must retain all of its e-mail correspondence for a certain period of time or pay heavy fines. If these e-mails are necessary in a lawsuit, it is important that they are available to the company. If a lawsuit should occur, it doesn’t matter if a personal account or a work account sent the e-mail- they are both the same thing as far as the court is concerned. No matter the nature of the email, ultimately the company will be held responsible for its contents.
What is the effect of instant messaging on organization networks? What are benefits and drawbacks of using instant messaging in an organization?
Instant messaging is most useful to a company because it offers real-time communication capabilities. It is also free, which saves the company money in communication costs. Instant messaging is a useful tool but, like e-mail, employees will sometimes use it for their personal use. Sometimes employees take an advantage of things like this because they think its okay to talk to their friends as well. I think when they have these networks on the computers for employees it takes their focus away from doing their work because they are busy instant messaging instead of working. I believe it does make it easier for people when they...