Human Resources - Email Reporting and Monitoring

When an employee incident happens, Human Resources managers are often criticized for not creating a strong enough policy to prevent it, or for not enforcing the policy well enough. Until now, they had no good tools to effectively do either one.

The Issues:
The problem is that with so many people using e-mail so frequently, there is a very real risk of offensive content being sent, not to mention the risk of intellectual property being sent outside of the company's domain. For many companies, there is also a very real cost of bandwidth and storage for e-mail traffic and attachments.

How can a company claim that an E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy protects their employees or the company, when there is no effective way for management to even be aware of what is happening with e-mail on a regular basis?

What if HR management knew that 31% of all e-mails had .jpg attachments, or that 20% of those attachments had the word "sex" as part of the file name or content? If management became aware of just this, wouldn't you investigate it immediately?

How would your management know when a policy breach has taken place? It could be happening every day. How can they address this concern or enforce policies effectively if they don't even know anything is wrong until it's too late?

HR management has a tough job when an employee comes to them with a workplace complaint. The HR manager is reliant on the IT department to access the e-mail store or read through mailboxes. And if the user deleted the specific e-mail, it is gone.

The MailMeter Solution:
MailMeter captures all internal and external e-mail into a secure, tamper-proof archive and makes it easy to search through by multiple criteria.

With MailMeter, the HR manager can easily perform e-mail investigations for any specific department, branch office or the entire organization.

You can identify e-mail patterns and misuse, enforce the company E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy and deter others from negative behavior.

• Full compliance with all regulations
• Save storage in your e-mail server - faster backups, disaster recovery, and better reliability
• Dramatically reduce costs of legal investigations
• Protect intellectual property
• Reduce organization and executive exposure
• Improve employee education about risky behavior
• Increase integrity of information since transactions cannot be deleted from the archive
• Improve productivity by enforcing the E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy

Important Questions to ask your IT, Legal, and Compliance Officer
As an executive, you should be very concerned at the lack of infrastructure, process and controls for archiving e-mail in your organization. You should ask your management team these important questions. If they cannot answer these questions, you may be placing your company at serious risk.

• What would be the cost or damage if your company had to pay penalty fines, or if you were fined or sanctioned for non-compliance?
• Do you have an E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy? Do all of your employees know it?
• How do you know when your policy has been broken? How do you measure, manage and enforce your policy?
• How many times has an employee e-mailed confidential information in error? Or on purpose?
• How do you know if employees are e-mailing offensive material to others within or outside the company?
• What percentage of your company e-mail is non-work related?
• How many gigabytes of pictures, music and movie files travel through your company each week?