Personal Email prohibited at work 9

[NS4U]

I have a gmail account which I use to email everyone- my family, friends, and some colleagues. I recently started working at a new place, which explicitly says "checking personal email accounts (ie. gmail) is prohibited."

I realize it is partly so I don't download viruses. However, I don't feel comfortable using my work email address for personal use (especially if I end up switching jobs in a few years or something). I have been putting in 9-10 hour days and it's kind of a pain to deal with all of my gmail email at once when I get home.

My question is, how is replying to a few personal email during the day any worse then taking a couple personal phone calls? Is this really "enforceable"? I'll probably talk to the head of IT in the next couple of days about it and see what he has to say.

Don't get me wrong, I love the job and if I can't check my email I will deal with it. It's not so important to me that I am going to run off and quit or anything. It's just a bit of an annoyance.

 

[SomptingGuy]

Actually that reminds me. A former employee where I work was sued for something which lead to lawyers people wanting to check through emails past and present.

 

[jeebusmn]

I live a boring life but I am not to keen on the idea of employer peering into my personal life. If you really want to write and check emails, use your cell phone.

 

[HgTX]

Government employees in Canada have been reminded, in the past, that all email sent/received at work is subject to the Access to Information Act, and backup copies are kept for this purpose.

I was going to bring that up as well. We have the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the States. That means yet another level of no expectation of privacy on work email. It also means I really ought to be deleting email on the document management schedule, but that archive is just so darn useful...

Hg

Eng-Tips policies: faq731-376

 

[2dye4]

If you want to test em use an encryption program for the text.
I've done it a couple of times just to see what might happen.
Nothing ever happened.
But if they liked me less it very well could have.

jmw
You are right they won't know the content until they read them but the wording is suppose to give some minimal protection to employees private lives.
For instance in front of a jury.
We read all of Bobs e-mails just for kicks. ( Bob wins lawsuit)

We read all of Bobs e-mails because he has been sending mails to our competitors ( Bob looses and is fired )

 

[NS4U]

I still check news headlines and stuff a couple times a day. but it's not like I track that time and charge it to overhead. 99% of the time it still ends up getting billed to a client, so it's not like the company doesn't lose potential income. granted, through the course of an 8 hour day, this is probably 20 mins or so.

A happy employee is a productive employee... and if checking email or news a couple of times a day makes an employee happy, then what's the bid deal?

 

[IRstuff]

There are games that were always played for defense jobs, since time is charged in increments of 6 minutes. Since you round up, any activity that's less than 3 minutes isn't chargeable to a contract, while the other part of the 6 minutes gets the full charge.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[SomptingGuy]

I discovered something really cool about my work email over the weekend. Not only can I access it from hom via some

http://www connection

and send/receive messages from home, I can also attach files to outgoing messages. So I can send a message from work with home attachments, from home. Wow! I wonder when that will be clamped down upon? My justification is that I check and reply to work emails on my own time.

- Steve

 

[IRstuff]

Sure, anyone with an Exchange server could get that set up with a Microsoft Outlook interface. Unfortunately, the web interface doesn't have the same visual features for messages and replies that Outlook itself has.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[HgTX]

Dang, I tried to copy & paste the warning from my login screen & it wouldn't do it. Anyway, it was a direct statement that no "right to privacy" is to be expected on the system.

Hg

Eng-Tips policies: faq731-376

 

[spongebob007]

Do others in the defense industry seriously charge their time in 6 minute increments? On my first day of work here I was told that is the official policy, but seriously I just can't be bothered tracking my time to that level of detail. If I am working on a contract for one hour and I take a five minute break to go to the can, I still charge the whole hour and not .9 hours. I figure it's all a wash anyway because on the other hand if say someone comes and asks me a question about a particular job and it takes me 5 minutes to answer it, I am not going to put .1 hours on my time sheet for that contract. I charge my time in .25 hour increments because that seems more reasonable to me. Even then it is still not 100% accurate since we track our time manually anyway.

 

[Gymmeh]

spongebob, The first "contract" time sheet i turned in, i read the instructions and did everything in 0.1 increments as the instructions said, and the boss told me

"WTF is this? re-do your time sheet in 0.5 hr increments, i dont want to deal with this sh!!!T"

Now I dont fill out time sheets :-(

 

[jmw]

Billable minutes?
What are lawyers doing in this forum?
Oh, silly me, they must have reviewed the time sheets format.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[ewh]

spongebob007,
When I worked for a direct military contractor, we had to account for our time in that manner. It was usually rounded to the nearest .5 hours, because as Gymmeh infers, it is a royal PITA. It would get to the point where you had to charge overhead just for filling out your timesheet.
Luckily, I have since worked for several military sub-contractors, and time reporting is much more reasonable.

Believe it if you need it or leave it if you dare. - [small]Robert Hunter[/small]

 

[MadMango]

We are told to charge 1hr minimum to overhead every day, regardless if we take breaks or not. The fun starts when we are told we are getting close to cost overruns and are asked to log 4hrs maximum on any given program per day. I'm starting to love Defense jobs.

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."

Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[IRstuff]

My favorite is the impromptu meeting called after 3pm on Fridays. Since we had to sign and turn in our timecards by 2pm, whoever calls the meeting gets free work.

My current company now requires timecards to be submitted by 9am Mondays.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[waskillywabbit]

Personal email - get unlimited data on your cell phone and get a gmail account

I wish we had a prohibitive policy at work and then maybe I'd quit getting chain letters about having bad luck for 10 years if I don't pass it along to 10 people.

Rules have to be put in place because "common sense ain't."



Brian

 

[ewh]

gmail
I don't feel comfortable knowing that google keeps everything you send or receive in perpetuity.

Believe it if you need it or leave it if you dare. - [small]Robert Hunter[/small]

 

[KENAT]

Ah timesheets, especially for the military. We were a bit more laid back in the UK but... We had an administration 'slop' number but... we weren't meant to book to it, at least no significant amount. So you ended up amortizing toilet breaks etc across jobs.

Like I said they didn't take it as seriously in the UK but it still didn't seem right.

I rarely used .1, I'd usually use .25 and round up or down as I deemed fit.

When I managed my own projects I'll let you guess which way I normally rounded!

KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...

 

[zoltecrules]

Just wanted to add an interesting policy I used to have at an old job:

We had your standard filters, firewall, etc. The fun thing would be our IT department would record EVERYTHING you would see on the web along with how much time you spent surfing. At the beginning of each week, they would post the rankings of ALL the employees (yes including the bosses) web surfing times along with a list of every website they visited. Definitely left everything in the wide open.

I accidentally left a baseball game website on one evening and got moved to the top of the list. My boss found out and was understandable about it.

Regarding the whole internet policy, it's kind of a two-sided coin. My boss once snuck up behind me one day to see what I was working on. I had an IE window open and like that I got a whole "You have work to get done. You shouldn't be surfing." Later that day, I handed him a copy of a EU patent that was very similar to a project he had me working on. He asked where I found the patent and all I could say was "surfing".

 

[MiketheEngineer]

How many of us are looking at this website while at work??