Does your boss check your work email?

[Crimebusterofthesea]

DH is a teacher and he has recently had a bit of a conflict with his head. The long and short of it is that DH saw his head had a copy of a document that he could have only got a copy of by logging in to DH's work email account and printing it off. It is nothing serious by any stretch - the document was an email that DH had received, with additional annotations on it.

I was wondering if anyone knew what the standard procedure was with regards to monitoring of work email?

My boss doesn't, but I believe that they are allowed to.

My advice is to not write down anything using your work email that you wouldn't want them to see.

I have friends who use their work email addresses for everything, it's quite annoying when they change jobs.

Get a gmail or similar for all personal stuff (not just personal, but also merely non-work-related).

Where I have worked, it was in the IT policies that emails may be read.

But, this sounds like misuse to me - it is usually so that they can check there is no inappropriate use of email, not as a way to routinely spy on people or access confidential data.

Yes, tis in my contract that emails amongst other things can be monitored. Also in education.

Agreed - monitoring misuse is one thing but this sounds like the head just wanted to see the document and didn't want to ask for it? Very odd behaviour.

Good practice is not to look at employee emails unless there is a problem (i.e. employee is suspected of emailing friends and family all day when they should be working). If this is the case, then the manager should ask HR to intervene to check what's going on.

It's always best to keep work email squeaky clean, however, I would still confront the head directly as I wouldn't be happy with someone sneaking around looking at emails. It's very poor management.

I had a boss who had access to my email and loads of other employee's email account. I only found out when I left. Nothing incriminating on my email but I blew my top when I found out. He's very well known and how I haven't outed the to55er him I just don't know.

He could, but I doubt he does - there's nothing that interesting in there.

I know someone who was sacked after bosses discovered that he had sent a document from his work email to a former colleague. Said document was nothing more than a blank template for recording meeting minutes, but it was seen as distributing confidential compnay information.

Never send an email you wouldn't want your boss to see.

Surely a blank template isn't confidential company information?

Yes. I'm part time and colleagues access my email on my days off to see if there is anything that needs actioning

We have been reminded that these email addresses belong to work - they are not ours.

Look at my emails - my boss sends emails from my work email and signs them in my name!!! I have to always check my sent items at the beginning of the day to catch up on what I'm supposed to have sent to people!! I'm used to it now and he is a good boss in all other ways but it does peeve me a bit.

mrsconfuded - apparently so, the template was showing how to run meetings around a particular issue, common across the industry.
It was completely ridiculous but it happened. Its an IT company so take their intellectual property very seriously.

Thanks everyone - I have encouraged DH to talk to his head, to gain clarification and to question whether this was a legitimate reason to access his email. IMO it is far from good management, the head just wanted to get his hands on this document to see what it said. It wasn't necessary, it was just spying.

Hmm...

Not sure what the head was thinking then. It's not going to foster great employee relations even if the email account does belong to the school/local authority.