Everyone connected with employment issues agrees that employers should draft a policy governing how staff can use email systems, but there any consensus ends. What the policy should say and how it should be implemented are highly contentious issues. The legal situation governing what is allowed and what isn't has the clarity of a Mississippi swamp.
Employers are as much in the dark as their staff.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which came into force earlier this year, calls on employers to have an agreed policy. The Human Rights Act says public bodies must respect privacy and Article 8 could be used in unfair dismissal cases to help assess the reasonableness of an employer sacking a worker for sending an email which is critical of a manager. The contentious regulations governing emails that came out last month were in response to the EU directive. Without the regulations, employers would have been prevented from looking at anything their staff sent or received via email, over the internet or on the telephone. These are in addition to an employer being able to monitor their employees' use of email in order to determine whether the use is business related.