Always Think of Your Email in the Context of Office Politics

Chances are that someone is reading your email and you don’t even know it.

Over the years I’ve worked with more than one person who was sure that all of their email was being monitored. They were convinced because mail would disappear from their folders or because messages they were sure they hadn’t opened would be marked as “read.” One woman took me aside and warned me not to send her anything I didn’t want her email administrator to see because she was sure that he was monitoring her inbox. While she was probably a little nuts and flattered herself that the contents of her mail would be quite that intriguing to anyone, her advice was excellent. It’s true that you should never put anything in email that you wouldn’t want your email administrator or anyone else to read.

I know that sounds extreme-- and next to impossible to implement since most of us use email to discuss everything from our personal lives to employee compensation and confidential information about our businesses-- but every time you put sensitive information into an email you are all but making it public. While you may have the most ethical and incurious email administrator in the world, she’s far from the only person who might be reading your mail. Once you hit "send" you have lost the ability to control the information in your email and ceded it to your recipients. They can then forward it along to as many other people as they chose, whether they do so by accident or on purpose, innocently or out of malice.

This is where the idea of office politics comes in. Before you send anything important in your email you have to ask yourself if there’s anything in it that someone could take advantage of. Could they profit financially? Could they make you look bad? Is there juicy information that they’d enjoy sharing with the water-cooler crowd? Or maybe your trust your recipients. But do you trust them to never make a mistake and always check that they’ve forwarded your message to an appropriate address or distribution list?

There’s a great example of careless email usage and the havoc it can wreak in the workplace in the U.S. version of The Office. Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) has just returned from vacation in Jamaica-- with one dreadlock-- and wants to impress his loutish friend David Packer with the fact that he has secretly been there with his boss, Jan. Of course Packer doesn’t believe him, so Michael tries to send him a picture of Jan sunbathing topless to prove it. But Michael, who makes a career out of cringe inducing behavior, outdoes himself this time. Instead of sending the photo to Packer he sends it to the Packaging department. Michael’s first impulse is to get the message back, but of course it’s too late for that. Soon everyone in the warehouse, the office, and the company has pictures of Michael and Jan in Jamaica.

Once your email is out in the wild, it’s just about impossible to make sure that you have recovered or destroyed all of the copies. It might be sitting in someone’s inbox, on their hard drive, have been printed as a hard copy or posted on someone’s blog. In the case of The Office, it might even have been blown up to poster size and hung on the wall of the warehouse.