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Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their managem

Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their management? That seems bonkers to me.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
Bonkers or no, that is a current legal reality if you're talking about chat or email messages which are sent and received using employer-provided means. If an email address ends in your employer's domain, it's not your email account unless you're self-employed.
zerkten 3y ago
I can't reply to the reply to this comment, but you raise a key point. While employers control the data, they don't use it like people seem to assume. Managers are not managing if they attempt to resolve conflicts by attempting to decipher private conversations. There are many ways to resolve these problems without resorting to spying on messages. In an in-person situation with a conflict, there may be no record. We know methods to resolve these conflicts, so I don't understand why people go immediately to "employers control the data so they can just use it."
luch 3y ago
That's not what I wanted to say. With remote teams, you need to establish a way to organize the work using written communications which are either mail/slack/sharepoint/whatever and within this framework management needs to have a "view" into what the team is doing. It means for example being systematically in cc for mail exchanged and being in every teams discord channel. The new social contract when working remotely is "you (the manager) can't look over my shoulder to see if I'm working correctly so I (the employee) need to show proofs of communication instead". I've seen too many juniors working remotely that just don't communicate on their day-to-day work, and completely blindside their manager/coworkers which understandably freaks out.
sokoloff 3y ago
I think in all team and project rooms/channels/email d-lists, yes, those should be easily readable by managers because they're not contemplated as private. I think DMs and individual emails should not be accessible to managers (absent a very specific legal/compliance/HR concern).
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  Oh, I certainly agree with that, and was hoping this was considered the norm (as it has been in my experience).

Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their management? That seems bonkers to me.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

Bonkers or no, that is a current legal reality if you're talking about chat or email messages which are sent and received using employer-provided means. If an email address ends in your employer's domain, it's not your email account unless you're self-employed.

zerkten 3y ago

I can't reply to the reply to this comment, but you raise a key point. While employers control the data, they don't use it like people seem to assume. Managers are not managing if they attempt to resolve conflicts by attempting to decipher private conversations. There are many ways to resolve these problems without resorting to spying on messages. In an in-person situation with a conflict, there may be no record. We know methods to resolve these conflicts, so I don't understand why people go immediately to "employers control the data so they can just use it."

luch 3y ago

That's not what I wanted to say. With remote teams, you need to establish a way to organize the work using written communications which are either mail/slack/sharepoint/whatever and within this framework management needs to have a "view" into what the team is doing. It means for example being systematically in cc for mail exchanged and being in every teams discord channel. The new social contract when working remotely is "you (the manager) can't look over my shoulder to see if I'm working correctly so I (the employee) need to show proofs of communication instead". I've seen too many juniors working remotely that just don't communicate on their day-to-day work, and completely blindside their manager/coworkers which understandably freaks out.

sokoloff 3y ago

I think in all team and project rooms/channels/email d-lists, yes, those should be easily readable by managers because they're not contemplated as private. I think DMs and individual emails should not be accessible to managers (absent a very specific legal/compliance/HR concern).

DiggyJohnson 3y ago
Oh, I certainly agree with that, and was hoping this was considered the norm (as it has been in my experience).