The Concept of Privacy in the Workplace - Essay Example

All the employees of the company must be given a corporate email account. The account will have a password known only to the user of the account. This control mechanism ensures that the only person that can enter the account is the employee. The concept of privacy in the workplace is a widely debated topic. A lot of employees feel that despite being paid a salary during work hours they are entitled to certain basic levels of privacy including the right to personal emails with confidential information.

The company’s policy should be to allow personal emails to occur, but its content cannot be confidential due to the possibility of a traitor leaking confidential information to outsiders using the email system of the company. The email content will be audited every 30 days for quality assurance purposes. An important element of the email system of the company is the usage of email to provide customer service. All major companies provide its customers an email address for support. It takes a lot of labor to read through these emails.

The company must hire an additional 50 employees to increase the speed of its email customer service support function. The new standard should be to increase the customer service response of the company to every 24 hours. To achieve this goal the customer service department must be redesigned to run a 24-hour operation composed of three daily 8-hour shifts. The email system and customer service function could be streamlined through the use of advances in information technology. The company could spend a few thousand bucks to incorporate an artificial intelligence that filters customer support emails based on necessity and customer inquiry.

The system could be used to provide faster support to customers that have major issues that require immediate attention. All the emails that are sent and received by employees will be stored in a database for five years. The customer's emails the company receives will be also be saved for at least five years. The system will automatically save the emails in a database upon being sent or received. Safeguarding the employees and customer information is very important for the company. The Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 increased the compliance costs for public companies in the United States.

The stored capabilities of the system will help the company comply with the Security and Exchange Commission and other governmental agencies regulations. The internal email policy of the company includes the following stipulations. The employees of the company must answer all emails within 24 hours of receiving the email. The employees can only access the information system of the company from within the physical facilities of the company. The employees must not take any digital documents of any information.

The employees can use the corporate email for personal emails, but they must realize that an audit may read the contents of the email for quality assurance purposes. The email has become a primary communication tool that everyone that is online uses for personal or business purposes. Due to the delicate nature of information transfer in corporate America companies have become stricter about security measures regarding electronic tools such as emails.