Mirapoint, a messaging
company, and Radicati Group, a consulting and market research firm,
recently conducted a survey on corporate email usage to understand how
employees use their email at work. The study entitled "Corporate Email
User Habits" uncovered that 23 percent of all messages in respondent's
corporate mailboxes are personal -- non-work related -- in nature.
When coupled with data from an April 2005 survey that found that
approximately 33 percent of corporate email is spam, the study reveals
that more than half of corporate email messages are not work related.
"It is no secret that employees use their corporate email for personal
matters, but the specific level was unknown," said Marcel Nienhuis, market
analyst at the Radicati Group. "These results indicate that personal use
of corporate email may be higher than employers expect, representing a
potentially significant loss in productivity."
The report also revealed that 72 percent of respondents forward jokes,
photos, video clips, and other non-work related messages via corporate
email to co-workers. Only 28 percent of respondents claim to "never"
misuse corporate email in this manner. Moreover, 12 percent of users
acknowledge sharing music files via corporate email, violating copyright
laws, occupying server storage and eating large amounts of bandwidth.
With 97 percent of respondents indicating they have a personal email
account, 25 percent of them admitted to regularly forwarding company email
messages to personal accounts and a whopping 62 percent of respondents
send business email from their personal email accounts.
Reasons for this may be as innocuous as staying on the job during an
email outage or as nefarious as avoiding a paper trail with their
corporate email account. With messages sent and stored outside of the
company firewalls, businesses lose the ability to monitor where these
messages are sent, how long they are kept, and how the information
contained in the messages is used. Businesses also cannot enforce policies
on intellectual property leakage or customer and employee privacy,
creating a liability issue.
"Most employees do not mean harm when using business email," said
Bethany Mayer, chief marketing officer at Mirapoint. "Despite good
intentions, employees may unwittingly expose sensitive company information
via working with their personal email, underscoring the need for greater
outbound email filtering and policy enforcement."
The study was conducted in September 2005, exclusively surveying
corporate email users. |
