WRITING THE RIGHT CORPORATE EMAIL POLICY: DO YOU HAVE ONE?
In today’s world businesses primarily run on emails. Emails not only have geared up the process how people in your organization communicate but it has enabled faster business processes too. What you or your employee write and communicate on emails reflects the overall vision of the company so it become very important for organization’s to have a proper corporate email policy in place. A better email policy can give you an added advantage over and above the right email security solution for your organization.
Email policies are important because they spell out what your organization considers as the right email usage and more importantly it underlines the inappropriate usages. So when you induct somebody new to your organization and they are introduced to employee policies, getting them introduced to an email policy are also of paramount importance. It is a good idea to ask the employees to sign the policy, which indicates that they thoroughly understood it.
Now when you are framing an email policy what points should you consider is an important question to ask? To be more pervasive should be the objective of writing the right policy document.
Here is a list of seven points to include:
1. Risks associated with Email: The policy should make email user aware of potential harmful effects of their wrong email actions. Advise your corporate email users that sending an email is like sending a corporate postcard so if you don’t want it to be posted on a bulletin board, then don’t send it.
2. Best Practices to be followed:
This section should speak about email etiquettes. Simply speaking it should enlist the “writing rules” while communicating over emails. Some common etiquettes are a) Don’t not write email in capitals b) Enable spell checking c) Read the email before you send d) Include email signature to conform company format e) Use proper grammar and punctuation while writing an email.
3. Personal usage: Generally try restricting your corporate users to use corporate email ids for personal conversations. Even you if you are allowing you can put a bar to the limit of usage through this section of the policy. Asking users to create separate folders to store personal emails and restricting them sharing attachments with specific formats like .exe,.mp3 etc . You can also include the maximum size of any attachment sent through email
4. Don’t jam the network:
Warn your users not to use corporate email for non business purposes. Unnecessary usage can tie up network traffic. The policy should also cover elements like use of newsletter or newsgroups which employees may subscribe using corporate email ids should be necessarily related to the line of work.
5. Email Disclaimer: if you are considering adding disclaimers to employee emails, inform them about its importance and what the same means.
6. Treatment of Confidential information:
Include rules and guidelines which employee should adhere to while sharing sensitive business information on emails. They should be made aware that they can’t forward confidential organizational information through email .Make employees encrypt any confidential information that they are sharing on emails and should be asked to built a habit of changing password on a regular basis to stay more secure.
If you have policy that monitors employee communication done on emails make them aware of the same
8. Measures if violation happens: The policy should include points which clearly state the repercussions which any employee can face if they breach the email policy. Include contact details of people in the organization who are to be notified in case there is a policy breach.
Originally published at - https://medium.com/@AuthShield2FA/writing-the-right-corporate-email-policy-do-you-have-one-4333e5ad033e
