The federal government protects employers' rights to monitor all electronic communications in the workplace. More than 80 percent of companies that conduct electronic monitoring inform their employees of their policies, according to a 2000 survey by the American Management Association. But Lewis Maltby, president of the National Work Rights Institute, said many of them are extremely general. One thing employees need to do is assume they're being monitored because they probably are. Maltby said it's almost never your immediate supervisor who is doing the snooping.
Most companies have corporate communications workers who conduct monitoring.
It seems clear that companies are not reading each and every message. There aren't enough hours in the day. Even workers who weren't targeted have been known to get into trouble. In June, Hewitt Associates, a global benefits consulting and delivery firm in Lincolnshire, fired 35 employees for violating its harassment policy for forwarding offensive e-mails. Jennifer Frighetto, a spokeswoman, said managers came across them accidentally.