If nothing is in place, the effect is often far reaching. Breaches in confidentiality, sexual and racial harassment, corporate liability and wasted productivity are just some of the concerns managers must contend with, not to mention corporate embarrassment, financial loss and employee severance which are often the results and these things make catchy headlines. Those involved with the Claire Swires e-mail will make testament to that. Well apparently not according to eMarketer who state that employees earning 50k to 75k a year are twice as likely to download pornography at work than those earning circa 20k. Therefore businesses need to pay attention to the material that circulates internally and adopt internal security policies.
Lets just consider a few or the more recently publicized scandals.
We will see that these were problems with the internal circulation of inappropriate material, a minor detail that the press often forget to mention. The problem here wasn't the single instance of a joke in poor taste, but rather that this joke spread throughout the organisation like a virus. Orange communications, never out of the press, were in it again but for all the wrong reasons recently. The case is probably the largest of its kind in Britain. The sacked staff are understood to have worked at the company's offices in Hertford and its call centres in the North-East.