Personal vs Professional: What Email Accounts Tell About Our Employees Habits

How many times do we hear about security breaches in major business corporations, attempts of hacking, or even more commonly, data loss due to mishandling when exchanging emails with our business contacts? Certainly, quite frequently.

In most cases, these scenarios can be prevented by teaching our crew how to properly split their personal and professional lives from the digital space; however, such tactics require time and effort from the managerial area to secure the best possible outcome. In this article, we are going to state some facts about what email accounts may tell us about our employees’ habits for surfing the internet.

On Email Listing Subscriptions

Newsletters, video-channel updates from YouTube and many other services that can be labelled as “junk mail” are popular actors of our email accounts, but what do they tell about our daily habits?

Certain subscriptions, as proves to be the case of scientific journals, local newsletters, leading entrepreneurial/businesses blogs should be encouraged, as they give not only vital information on the latest events happening both locally and worldwide, but also make room for important debates and broadening our knowledge. On the other hand, subscriptions from video game forums, gossip magazines, etc. should be left to the “personal” email account, as they don’t bring any value to the company’s required performance level – quite the opposite, as they are non-less but distractors from our current tasks to accomplish.

The Social Media Liabilities

Quite frequently we associate our working email accounts with social media platforms, as is the case of Facebook, Twitter, etc. in the first term, but also not so common services that can open the gates towards malware. As managers, we ought to prevent any involvement of our brand in such activities, as it’s the first step to increase security measures for our brand.

How to prevent this from happening? Start by teaching webinars on proper social media etiquette to follow, mentioning the hazards of unsafe navigation in social media services, plus requiring – if needed – auditing from external consultants to check if our employees’ corporative credentials have been used to the internet for means that aren’t strictly work-linked. 

On Dating Sites and its Drawbacks

Another factor to consider is the vast amount of email exchanges that could be gathered thanks to the contribution of online dating these days. Sometimes, people don’t think it’s strictly needed to have a spare email account to email our significant other; however, as much truth that can be said over long-term couples use to communicate without looking at which email account they use, in the case of new couples the logic is somewhat different.

The main inconvenience with new couples and people meeting strangers through dating sites is when they use their corporative email accounts, which they are also opening the gates towards a large amount of contact information, as your company name is usually there in the area designated for the domain. Imagine then getting dozens of unwanted personal emails at your contact form area as one of your employees isn’t dating one person any longer and the only means of contact that person has is through your company site: obviously, that isn’t the scenario any business owner would like to have. 

In Conclusion

To sum up, there are many elements that can be used as performance indicators coming from email accounts. Recent studies show the inefficiency of banning social media networks from the workplace, as such posture is often seen as restricting the employee’s options in terms of decision-making, yet you ought to set some ground rules for the usage of your corporative email accounts and how much time do personal issues take from your usual work shift.

In general, ban any affiliation to forums, gaming, online gambling sites, adult content, etc. as it’s bad publicity and opening the gates to potential hazards as getting attention from hackers. Usage of corporative email accounts for forums can be encouraged only if the content of the forum itself is strictly linked to your industry activity and it can benefit your company’s advertisement strategy, as is the case of many e-stores along the internet.

We can resume some of the most crucial factors on email usage in this infographic of Avatier.