KEY POINTS:
Last week's news that an office worker who forwarded a lurid email had won $9000 compensation for unjustifiable dismissal left employers scratching their heads.
At first glance, the Employment Relations Authority's decision in favour of the administrative assistant seems to be a slap in the face for businesses that go to the effort of writing and trying to enforce email and internet "acceptable use policies".
The authority was told Jessica Wood was given a copy of Arthur D Riley & Co's policy against accessing and transmitting "inappropriate material" when she started work with the company. In nine months she was issued two warnings for breaching the policy, then sacked after forwarding a joke email containing images of naked people to workmates and friends.
Despite decreeing the company had "broadly sensible guidelines" for office email use and ruling the images at the heart of the case "were clearly designed to shock and ridicule" the authority still awarded Wood a payout.
It said the company had "a significantly flawed and less than consistent approach" to its policy because other staff who received the email had not been disciplined. It also ruled the images were not as objectionable as the company claimed.
In its Business Update e-newsletter this week, employer lobby group Business NZ scoffs at the authority's suggestion that the company could have gone to the Office of Film and Literature Classification for an objective view of the email.
"The thought of companies all over New Zealand having to run to the official censor to rule on employees' naughty emails is a humorous one," it said. "But more important, the ruling raises the question of a company's right to set its own standards, both for the protection of staff and protection of the company's image and brand ... Why shouldn't companies have the right to set and maintain standards of appropriate workplace behaviour?"
While it is probably drawing a long bow to suggest questionable joke emails pose a risk to a company's brand, last year's case of the Great Marquee Company was testament to the dangers of inappropriate emailing.
The Auckland marquee hiring business hit the headlines after the mass distribution of a staff member's email describing a potential client's wedding as cheap, nasty and tacky.
Business NZ raises an important question: Does the Wood ruling mean companies are hamstrung in enforcing what staff do on their work computers?
No, says Bradley Anstis, Auckland-based director of product management for IT security company Marshal.
Anstis says companies risk running into trouble when they file policies in the bottom draw rather than using filtering technologies to regularly monitor staff email and internet use. "If they [Arthur D Riley & Co] were able to prove they had all this technology and were consistently enforcing the acceptable use policies across all their employees I think they would have had a much stronger position in this case," he says.
Marshal is just one of a raft of technology companies that would be delighted to sell your business some software able to do that and monitor the internet sites staff visit.
It's pretty effective technology. It has been around long enough for the algorithms to detect dodgy content without spitting out too many "false positive" results - legitimate emails incorrectly identified as dubious.
Technology for censoring attached image files, however, has a way to go to catch up. Anstis says Marshal's technology "will probably capture about 80 per cent of the bad stuff and accidentally capture between 8 and 10 per cent of the good stuff".
Some businesses take the stance that monitoring email and internet traffic is more trouble than it is worth because productivity suffers when legitimate emails are quarantined.
But Anstis argues it comes down to how you set your system up. Rather than automatically scrubbing anything dodgy, it can send users a prompt reminding them of company policies and inviting them to continue receiving or sending a suspicious email only if it really is work-related.
As well as preventing the occasional legit email disappearing, that has the added benefit of creating an audit trail demonstrating policies are being applied consistently - a factor the authority ruled was lacking in the Wood case.
