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Subscribe to RSSWith so many business scandals lately, there’s often a damning e-mail exposing wrongdoing, often sent by high-level employees.
Just last week, government officials investigating the collapse of MF Global released an email from the firm’s assistant treasurer that could implicate the CEO, former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine.
The e-mail states: “Per JC’s direct instructions” millions of dollars were transferred out of customer accounts to cover a shortfall at the defunct brokerage, an act that could spell legal problems for both Corzine and the treasurer.
E-mail evidence like this isn’t unusual. Last year, an investigation into phone-hacking charges at News Corp. unearthed damning e-mails that showed top managers were informed about widespread illegal activity. And even the Oracle-Google patent fight has a “damaging e-mail” that is part of the saga. According to a recent article in Computer World, Google has been trying to keep an e-mail written by one of its engineers out of the case.
So, the question is, why do people keep putting potentially harmful information in e-mails? Sure, it’s great for prosecutors who want to expose malfeasance at companies, but after so many public e-mail faux pas you’d think people would have wised up.
One of the top reasons they haven’t is “hubris,” maintained Dave Scher, an employment attorney with the Employment Law Group. “People think they’re above the law.”
Scher represents employees in cases of retaliation or discrimination at work, and with about half of his cases he’s able to find e-mails that corroborate or confirm retaliatory or discriminatory conduct.
One of the most blatant e-mails came from a boss who was pretending to be a licensed therapist. When his employees exposed him, the manager sent the worker an e-mail basically stating he was firing him because he revealed his lie. It was a retaliatory move that’s illegal under labor laws.
Indeed, about a quarter of companies have had an employee e-mail subpoenaed as part of a lawsuit or regulatory investigation; and 9 percent ended up in court because of an employee e-mail, according to the most recent report on business communications policies by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute. This is despite that about 80 percent of organizations have written e-mail policies, the study found.
Stephanie Weiland Knarr, a licensed psychotherapist from Laurel, Md., isn’t surprised that people who engage in shady acts have no qualms about letting it all hang out on e-mail. “The personality type of someone who is engaging in illegal behavior is often narcissistic,” she explained, adding that they think they’re invisible and above the law. “These types of people like to take risks and even if they’re caught and the writing is on the wall, so to speak, they still deny it.”
What may also be driving some of this is that many employees just don’t take e-mail seriously, surmised Nigel Cannings, technical director for Chase Information Technology Services, a London-based firm that does corporate compliance.
“What we have found is that people just don't think of e-mail as ‘real,’” he explained. “To them it's an ephemeral thing that is sent off into the ether, and which is a) private, and which b) can be deleted. Usually, both are untrue.”
Indeed, in most cases you can’t just scrub your e-mails away if you realize they could be career killers, or land you in legal hot water.
“Depending on industry and the size of an organization, e-mails are immediately written to an enterprise repository, which is accessible by legal and compliance functions. And which cannot be deleted, even if they are deleted from the e-mail client,” Canning noted.
And, he added, “Financial regulators insist that e-mails are maintained for potential later investigation. Increasingly this is the case for IM messages as well, and they are likely to be the next big area where people get caught out.”
It’s not just illegal deeds that are exposed via e-mail. Patti Johnson, a career expert and the CEO of PeopleResults, said the e-mail flubs she sees most include:
- The misinterpretation: “E-mails are often misinterpreted because you wrote it quickly, used the wrong tone or copied the world. A poorly worded or quickly written e-mail can send the relationship in a downward spiral because it is misinterpreted.”
- The misused CC: "This is often the equivalent of saying I need to let your boss know because I'm not sure you will get it done, or I need someone else to be involved. Use the CC with intent or you can end up with a trust issue on your hands unintentionally.”
- The address mixup: “E-mails sent to the wrong person. Yes, it happens and it isn't pretty. You type the person's name in you are complaining about.”
- The angry: “E-mails sent when you're mad. This is time to take a deep breath and make sure you have the facts and pause. A good rule of thumb is if you are going to send a flaming e-mail out, sleep on it first or at least walk around the block. Because once it goes - you can't get it back.”
In the end, e-mails are “permanent and very, very mobile,” stressed Margaret King, director of a consumer research think tank, The Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis.
“Never put anything in an e-mail that you would not want quoted in the New York Times,” she advised. “If the material is that sensitive, ask the recipient to give you a call, and transmit that way.”
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Along with those four categories of email flubs, I think they should include the "nuclear option" email.
I think probably every organization has a few of these people in them: the overreactive, panic-attack, call-in-the-cavalry horsemen of the apocalypse, who have the infuriating tendency to cc the ENTIRE chain of command for the most banal and inconsequential reasons, starting pissing matches between directors and VPs over issues that could easily have been handled by middle management, and getting everyone caught in the crossfire as a result.
Here's the deal: start at the bottom of the management ladder and work your way up. If the operations manager didn't get the job done, go over his head and bump it up to the associate director. If the associate director didn't get it done, then bump it up to the director. If the director doesn't get it done, bump it up to the AVP. If the AVP doesn't get it done, then go to the VP.
DO. NOT. CC. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. THEM. IN. YOUR. FIRST. EMAIL.
Because when you do, you open a pandora's box that no one wants to deal with.
Here's another tip. Don't be evil.
Then you don't have to worry about evidence.
Great article on warning people how to better hide their evil.
i also think that sometimes these people have over time, deceived themselves to the extent that they no longer see what they are doing as illegal or immoral.
they send the email thinking they are just telling it like it is.
What I like is when I send a perfectly legitimate email to a coworker who then forwards it some 3 other people while slightly changing the subject content. This process keeps repeating itself using the "reply all" function and I receive 427 emails in return for the one I sent, and none of them are about my topic or have anything to do with me.
You're bashing me for "killing trees." You just gave the perfect example of why I print my email. If this ever happens to me, I have the proof of what I actually sent.
Ever heard of such a thing off covering your ass when all hell breaks loose when you know that you where forced to do something illigal?
Same for CC's never send a message without a CC or a BCC.
That is the new world of power politics in the office
Cynical:
That's why I print hard copy. I have had email saved that have mysteriously disappeared. Don't know how that happened but that is when I started printing copies. Better safe than sorry.
Our office has had state auditors sent in to check us out because some one wants us gone. Needless to say the auditors didn't find anything illegal in our operations.
Glad he mentioned the misused CC....i've seen that one before and nothing will tick you off like one of those.
Another thing that people often forget about is the problem of e-mail being forwarded. No matter how careful you are about who you address and e-mail to, you never know who it might wind up being forwarded to. More than once I have seen a person read the first part of an e-mail and in haste immediately forward it along without reading the rest of it or fully considering the impact of sharing the information further. Never assume that someone you send an e-mail to will treat it as private or confidential, even if you ask them to in the e-mail. They may decide for themselves that, it is OK to add this one more person in on the information sent and then it snowballs from there. The other thing is that people forwarding e-mails sometimes edit them or only forward part of the message, changing the meaning and the tone entirely. The best bet is to talk to the person face to face about anything that could be controversial or where your meaning or intent might be misconstrued. It is often hard to get the right tone to reliably come across in the written word where in a conversation the tone of your voice can say as much and sometimes more than the actual words that are spoken.
I work in IT. Most people outside of IT still do not realize how email works or how permanent it is. Out of sight, out of mind. Then, when an old email comes back to bite them (like that email I save stating that I could have a specific day off) they learn the hard way how permanent email can be.
These are the same people that post questionable pictures of themselves on Facebook and then are shocked when their wife sees them and divorces them.
It's not just email; people don't realize the extent to which their communications within the company are monitored. All emails, instant messages, browsing history, and VoIP calls should be considered monitored and/or recorded, and the should be treated as such. Keep that in mind next time you feel like trashing your boss via IM or forwarding an off-color email you found humorous. People have been canned for less.
If you workplace falls under FRCP, SOX, or HIPAA rules, the law requires that your stupidity be archived and retained per certain guidelines.
So, you might blame the company, but they're under some stiff penalties if they don't archive your porn habit, insolent messages about your boss, Bamarama/Republican Party of Doom rants, racial jokes, etc. They may not do anything about it, but when the Sh!t hits the fan, your competition just needs to do a request for evidence and all those archives spill out into being eyed by people who might care.
IF; & its a big if, you need to copy someone in authority, either to keep them in the loop or if the mire is about to hit the spinny thing, and they need to be advised, use the BCC function & blind copy them. It is still saved by the system, but has saved my butt at least twice.
I also keep a copy of every email I have received & sent since I joined my company, also saved my Butt a couple of times.
Phil:
I am right there with you. Not only do I save all incoming and outgoing email, I also, immediately after sending or receiving, print hard copies of all email for my records. You never know when someone will "edit" an email without your knowledge. As you said, saved my backside more than a few times.
That's CYA email
Real:
You got it! The field in which I work is extremely cut throat. Not only do I cover mine but my boss' as well. Had too many people after us not to.
Way to kill some trees Ms. C1960!
I still know people that print their emails to read them.....
Say what you will Todd, maybe you haven't been in the position to need the backup. I try to print as little as possible. I actually print a lot less than most of the people I deal with on a daily basis and have often made the same comment to some of those people as well. I am well aware of the trees being "killed" daily by those of us in the field I work in. I do what I do to protect my job as well as my boss'. The boss lady has asked me, specifically, to do the printing. Therefore I do. It has come in handy on numerous occasions.
If I need to keep email traffic I send them to an off site account like my AKO or Gmail accounts. If I'm dealing with things on a classified network I forward the traffic to my AKO-S account. I don't have room to store paper copies of the email I send and receive!
I do understand the need to conserve our trees. I try to use recycled paper as often as possible. Also, I do have the room to store hard copies. Like I said, the boss lady wants hard copies, the boss lady gets hard copies. I must say, those copies have pulled us out of a jamb often enough to justify the printing.
Have a great day.
Buy a thumb drive and copy it at night if you are that paranoid in the office.
Luddite.
Not paranoid just careful. Every email I print goes into the file it correspondes to. Boss lady wants hard copy, boss lady gets hard copy.
Why do you keep saying "boss lady?"
If your boss was a male, would you say "boss man?"
Just curious, because your screen name indicates you are a woman, but that constant repetition of "boss lady" begins to sound almost chauvinistic after awhile. There are a lot of women in positions of authority, and I wonder why you need to always attach gender to the word boss.
Why do those two little words get under your skin? Is it because you are a guy and it strikes a nerve or something?
I mean nothing more than respect for my boss. Not that I need to explain myself to a total stranger but lets just say it's a nick name and leave it at that. I have come to love my boss as friend. When it is time to work we work, but when it is time to play we put aside work and are true friends. She is one of the most awesome women I am privileged to know. If I were working for a man, I don't think that we would be as close as we would be as women. You know the whole pc thing and all. I have worked for men before and I just called them "Sir" out of respect.
I don't understand why some people feel the need to pick apart every word everyone on these pages post. Plainly and simply a nick name.
Ah. That explains it.
I wasn't trying to pick on you. Just the repetition of it struck me as odd and I'm the curious sort. Im interested in people and how they think, especially how they use subtext.
And btw, I'm a woman.
Oh, Patter, let me just add. I have worked for a few women before the "Boss Lady" and have never had a working friendship with them as I have with her. They were all power struck. Just because they are in a higher position doesn't make them any smarter or better human beings than the worker bees that keep them where they are. I had a supervisor at one time who would ask me how to spell a word. When our sewing factory shut down she got a job at a whole sale outlet in a supervisory position, didn't take long for her to be down graded to one of those worker bees she so despised.
My current boss is the only woman I have ever felt comfortable enough with to call "Boss Lady." No chauvinism here, just plain old fashioned respect.
Patter:
No harm, no foul. Just didn't understand why it bothered you. Just a miss understanding I guess. Glad I could help you understand where I am coming from.
We as women know how hard it is to reach the positions some men get quite easily. We have to work harder and be smarter especially in the field my boss and I work in.
When my sewing plant shut down I was able to go to college on the Trader Readjustment Act. Paid for virtually everything. Graduated with a 3.83 gpa. I actually scared myself. Didn't know I had it in me. I had been married for 14 yrs. to a man who constantly told me how stupid I was to keep me under his thumb. Finally came to my sense and got out at the age of 32. Did better without him than I ever did with him. So when I meet a woman like my boss who is an outstanding representation of what we women can be and accomplish with hard work and determination, I like to let them know how much respect I have for them.
Wow--good going! Tough to do and a hundred times tougher when you're carrying baggage meant to disempower you. I feel really proud for you.
And yes, it's true we have to work twice as hard as men. Thank goodness that's not hard to do. ;)
LOL Patter, I totally agree. It is not very hard to be smarter than some of them. Thanks for the thumbs up. It was very hard. I had no job and only a 12th grade education. Lived on $400/month for quite a while. My son, to this day, will not eat beans and rice. There were times I didn't have the money for any meat so I learned how to make black eye peas as well as red beans and rice taste really good. But you do what you have to do. I am such a better place now. Have been so Blessed with a terrific husband and the best boss in the world.
Glad to know there are women like you out there that aren't afraid to give another women a pat on the back for a job well done. I have had so many women try to keep me down just like the ex.
Thank you. You also sound like a strong and independent woman. Props to you as well.
Have a wonderful and Blessed day.
Also, an angry or impulsive e-mail can attract blame for ancilary events outside of the email. I wrote to a partner about the disgusting public behavior of a junior staff member with TWO of her senior project managers and some strangers on a bar floor during a happy hour. That pissed of the particpants, but I got blamed for the details going around about who that junior staff did in the restroom, and which manager she went home with for the night - all of which I didn't even know. That was spread around by someone who stayed for the entire evening of "festivities" after I left. But I got nailed because I put something in writing about the public behavior, and then everyone not there assumed I must have leaked the details about what happened behind closed restroom doors and homes in my e-mail. It took months for that to get sorted out.
Before I hit the send button on anything controversial or inflammatory at work, I always ask myself: “Am I willing to see this on the front page of the newspaper?”
If I can answer yes, I send it; otherwise into the memory hole it goes.
I do the same thing. Not the newspaper, but I ask myself what if other people see this? I was bitten badly by an email sent to a friend who let his boss see it. All kinds of fallout from that and a hard lesson for me.
If I'm sending an email that could be considered rude or offensive, I always have a couple of my coworkers read it first before hitting send. It has saved me from embarrassment on more than a few occasions.
I have one personal policy of my own when I send emails to co-workers. Always be careful what you say and who you say it to.
I got one of those CC emails and pissed me off. All it could have taken is the person emailing me with an issue that needed to be taken care of and I would have done so, but when I saw the CC and many of the top managers were CC'd for something banal, that put the person who sent the email in my cross-hairs.
See my first post. That's the "nuclear option" to which I was referring.
My manager insists that I CC her on everything. I know that's probably making a lot of people mad, but I don't have a choice. Keep this situation in mind when seeing a CC on the email you receive. Maybe the person has been told that they have to address it to specific places? I get to send something to her and to her boss all the time per her orders. That reflects badly on me. I bet her boss loves it.... And maybe he does?
We used cc quite a lot in the military. Often it was just to keep the boss apprised of the status of things or to give him a chance to override the decision if he didn't like it. I rarely saw it used to intimidate the recipient (that did happen, but not often).
That's why I use the BCC function.
But.....if you use the BCC function make sure you send the person you BCC'd a separate email letting them know it was a BCC so they don't do a "reply all".
A further tip to those who email frequently: "regards" is not the best closing you can use. Keep in mind - the "g" key is right next to the "t". You could easily end up calling some very important people in your company retards.
Or vice-versa
Or the person using Regards just might use it because they get to think Retards every time they use it.
I have a work mate who uses that kind of second meaning in emails. If you know how he thinks, you come to realize that certain issue is diplomatically insolent to the point of insubordination, but the person receiving it would never recognize that.
Chris: LOL at that one! Never occurred to me.
I have a fear of typing the word "public." You leave one little letter out and you could have a big problem on your hands. Especially when typing legal docs. I always triple check it anytime I type that word.
CC drives me bat sh*t crazy! Nobody pays attention to who else the email was sent to and I'll get the same email 4 or 5 times from different people. It happens with my personal email too GRRRR....
I will CC a manager or whatever if I directly mention what they told me in an email so as to allow for correction if I misunderstood instructions. Having said that, I have had a manager get angry because I CC'd her Director in an email to her. The Director was grateful for being kept in the loop. My boss, on the other hand, was pissed and accused me of breaking her trust. She didn't seem to "get" that she had already broken trust when she accused me of lying/not providing all the facts while she and I were in a meeting with the Director. Yes, I WILL go there when pushed.
Well, you did go over her head. That's a pretty big corporate faux pas unless absolutely justified. And what's to say you didn't leave out some key information in that meeting?
Sounds to me like you're one of those nightmare employees no one wants on his/her staff. Might want to limit how many personal effects you keep on your desk, if you catch my drift.
Another important rule of email etiquette - DELETE YOUR DAMN ATTACHMENTS.
There is absolutely nothing worse than a 50+ response email chain between team members in which people neglect to delete attachments, especially when they're 5MB+ and you're running a cranky program like Lotus that screams at you if your inbox goes over your allotted amount.
Look carefully at your forwarding options, people. See that one that says "Forward" and the one that says "Forward with attachments"? DON'T SEND EVERYONE THE ATTACHMENTS WHEN THEY ALREADY HAVE IT.
kthanxbai
Chris if I weren't already married I'd ask you to marry me ;) that's my other pet peeve!
Once upon a time in a company far far away...
***WARNING: IT WAR STORY. CONTAINS TECHNICAL INFO THAT NEWBS MAY HAVE DIFFICULTY UNDERSTANDING***
Our email system had no mailbox size limits nor any size limit on attachments. Also, the email server lived off-site at a hosting facility. Our link to said server was a VPN tunnel over a maxed out fractional T1 line.
One day, the manager of the software development department felt it necessary to take a screenshot of his two-monitor wide desktop, attach it into an Outlook message as a 25 MB uncompressed BMP file, and send it to the email group "Company-All". For the next hour, while 150 copies of this 20 MB file pushed down to everyone's Outlook client, the network was unusable.
Mother of god...
My boss tried doing something similar. Not understanding size limitation, he stuffed an album of pictures onto the email. Most people don't recognize that the mime64 encoding used to send binary data actually bloats the amount of data needed to send at a multiplication of 1.5 times the original. He wondered why the email send took all night and then rejected. Tried it twice more. I looked it up on the internal email server, and was it a doozy at an amazing 2.2 Gigabytes.
There is good and bad to this. One company I know of immediately cuts off all access to e-mails when they terminate an employee so unless the employee has forwarded all of the emails to another account, everything is lost if there was evidence of violations against the company.
Company policies differ, and confidentiallity is primary, but a person has to cover their behinds.
If you're terminated, there should be no reason you need access to your work email anymore. Business email accounts should be used for ONLY that - business. You have no reason to use it for anything personal.
If you're concerned about misconduct on the part of your company, print the emails in question when you have a concern and maintain a file of hard copies. You had better NOT be forwarding your all business emails to a private account; that is a gigantic breach of security policy and by itself would probably be grounds for termination.
The company may have been involved in misconduct, but the person did not print out or forward emails. He felt unable to take it to court to retrieve the emails that damned him or so he said.
He could've subpoenaed the company for the emails. Records retention policies usually require that archives are maintained for several years at least.
I BCC myself on any potentially damaging email traffic. Especially if it could be used as a "Get out of jail free card". I've heard stories of some bosses using the IT department to pull and delete email traffic from people's accounts, and I want to make sure that if something like that does happen to an important email, I have it where the IT folks can't get it.
how about the habitual Reply All? i have received plenty of messages that should have been a private conversation between the responder and the original email author, but the responder has hit Reply All. sometimes, another person responds to ~that~, and soon everyone is caught up in what should have been a private conversation. even when it is not inflammatory, it is a huge waste of time for most of the recipients.
Well, here's an idea: don't be snippy about your coworkers in an email. Save that crap for the water cooler.
We should really record everything, a little guilt, a little regret, a little sorry, a little oops now and then and maybe we could avoid a bigger quilt, a bigger regret, a bigger sorry, a bigger oops would save us despair.
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Solve problems when they are small, when you first see them, flag them as errors, and if they occur again enumerate the errors and the fix.
Softerror - The best that error can offer is its solution.
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Is anything done right?
Actually.....it seems emails reveal the truth and those that hide behind these rules are the problem. If its true.....say it. Get it out now and lets work thru it. If you hide it.....all you're doing is suggesting you know you have a responsibility but dont want to be held accountable for it. Lawyers wil find you....thats what they do.....they're as bad, if not worse than a police office writing tickets.
The more money and education you have, the more you think the rules do not apply to you. This is why high level people cheat on their spouses, break the law, cook the books of their companies and any number of things. My favorite is when these over-educated types thing that their education means that they're smarter than everyone else...and then they go and do something stupid like send one of these e-mails.
The higher in the corporate chain, the dumber you are about the small common things like self-preservation and the operation of e-mail.
From my experiences doing computer help desk work, having Vice President on your little desk plaque tells me immediately that your email trash folder will have items in it dating back to when the account was opened for you and that if I tell you it's wasted disk space and that you need to empty your trash, I will get this incredulous look followed by another which shows you realized you were ignorant and don't want to show it, or proclaim your ignorance by asking me how to empty your trash folder.
The in folder will also have stuff in it dating back to the beginning of time, stuff that the person couldn't be arsed to deal with.
So, basically, put these people on Google Apps where it does an auto trim after 30 days on the trash folder, at least it won't be there.
There's also an ascending arrogance as you get up the chain. "I'm right and you're stupid, no matter how much education you have in your field of expertise" tends to be the norm. And yet us little people have to keep bailing you out of your self-induced quagmire.
One of my biggest pet peeves is people who forward an email without deleting all of the email addresses of people who also forwarded without deleting the addresses. (Does that make sense to any one but me?)
Any way, I get email from one person in particular who never deletes the addresses and some times there are hundreds of addresses attached.
Please, people, delete those addresses. I always do. I do not care to know the addresses of all the people who sent the email before it got sent to me.
I hardly ever cc or bcc. I send the email then I forward copies of that email to anyone I want to cc. Just feels safer that way. And I only send email to one person at a time, not to a mile long list of addresses. I takes more time that way but I know I would prefer not to have my email address forwarded to some one I don't know or don't want to have my address. I sent an email to a co-worker who then forwarded it to a person I didn't want to have my email addy. I started getting the most vulger email from the person who received my addy as a forward. I was not a happy camper! Needless to say, the co-worker never got another email from me.
It takes more time... Not I takes is what I meant.
Thank goodness we have msnbc to help corporate fellons better cover up their crimes. Wait, thats not a good thing, that sucks.
Email can sometimes be described as the bain of one's existance. People can be sooooo stupid....
NEVER bcc ANYONE!!! Had a former high paid boss who did this one time. Note the word former?
When I worked in local government, our emails were low hanging fruit for reporters looking for "scandals" or at least something semi-embarrassing that would get a lot of hits on their web sites. There were public email terminals and reporters and others could read virtually everything we send almost in real time. We were told to be very paranoid and before hitting send, read it two or three times, and then decide would you be fine if this email is in the paper and being forwarded by hundreds of thousands of others to laugh at you a couple of days later.
squig:
Not covering up any crime, just covering my backside incase someone tries to make it look like I didn't do my job. I have had people come back months after a document was sent and tried to say they either didn't get the doc or got the doc was late. In that case I can pull my file and fax them the proof or forward the original email to which the doc was attached with the time and date stamp on it.
Just being careful, 'cause I do like my job.
Sometimes Satanic forces literally drive the fingers to say things that truly are not part of the sender's mind.
"Per JC direct instruction"? Jesus told him to do that