Back to top Tell a raunchy joke to a woman in your office and you may find yourself hit with a sexual harassment suit. Employees have come to grips with this, and now must come to realize that sending that joke via company e-mail is the same thing. Thailand has established legal standards of assault and harassment. In addition, many firms are beginning to make their own internal standards more rigorous than the law. E-mail makes it so easy to toss off a quick, allegedly humorous remark, notes a trainer at Employment Law Learning Technologies, a firm which educates executives on modern business problems, and warns against this temptation.
Many workers think their company or Internet e-mail is private.
They think that their solitary e-mail letter is quickly lost, a mere snowflake in the company's Internet blizzard. Like President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky before them, such workers are wrong. Old e-mail never dies, and can almost always be dredged up in case of a complaint. A company that established such a filter would, legally, be on stronger grounds in a lawsuit. Spying on employees establishes that the company is serious about preventing offenses.