Respond to Email Jokes at Work

At one time or another, everyone will receive a personal email in their inbox, whether it is a joke or recipe or a photo of a cousin's new granddaughter. Unfortunately, personal emails can be costly for employers. Research shows that 15% of employers have had to fight discrimination suits related to email jokes that were deemed offensive. In addition, joke emails can tie up systems and often contain viruses, which can be devastating to company computer systems. Employees should heed caution when receiving personal emails at work and take steps to protect themselves from disciplinary action, which could include termination without warning. It is important to learn how to respond to email jokes at work.

Steps

  1. Read your company policy regarding personal use of company computers.
    • Many employers restrict or forbid personal use of company computers, and this includes email messages.
  2. Check the policy to see if you can forward personal emails to a personal email account without violating policies.
    • If your employer has a policy against forwarding any personal emails, you should not forward the email to a personal email address, but should immediately delete it without reading it.
  3. Report repeated SPAM or inappropriate joke emails to the IT Department immediately by calling them as forwarding could violate company policy.
  4. Call your friends, relatives and even co-workers requesting that they not send personal emails to work and ask them to use your personal email address.
    • A better suggestion is to email your friends, relatives and co-workers from your home email address so that they will then have the address to add to their own email address books. Be sure to do this from home and not from your work computer.
  5. Remove your work email address from any non-business email subscriptions, replacing it with your home email address.

Tips

  • If you do not have a personal email address, you can set up free accounts using Yahoo, Gmail or MSN. These emails should be set up on your home computer, however, and not at work.
  • Some email systems will let you create settings so that joke emails are automatically forwarded to another email. Check with your IT Department to see if this is available at your workplace, and if so, set known personal email addresses to automatically go to your personal email address.

Warnings

  • Employers have the right to monitor and retrieve any emails sent or received on their system.
  • Deleting an email does not eliminate it from the system. Servers keep copies of emails even after they are deleted and employers can retrieve those emails at any time and have the legal right to do so.
  • Violations of company policies regarding inappropriate email can result in immediate termination. Although most employers will give employees warnings when they uncover violations, they are not required to do so.
  • Forwarding sexually explicit or racial emails is almost always forbidden by employers. If you open an inappropriate email, delete it immediately and notify your IT department that you received it. Failure to notify the proper department could result in discipline action even if you do not forward the email.

References

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