Your employees might just be inadvertently representing your agency while bouncing around on any of several social networks (LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.). Does your insurance agency need a policy regarding blogging, ‘Facebooking’ or Tweeting on Twitter? The New York Times seems to think they need one, and here it is:
* Don’t specify your political views. This includes joining online groups that would make your political views known.
* Don’t write anything you wouldn’t write in The Times on your profiles, a blog, or as commentary on content you share.
* Be careful who you ‘friend’. Since this is a tricky subject, The Times suggests that its reports “imagine whether public disclosure of a ‘friend’ could somehow turn out to be an embarrassment that casts doubt on our impartiality.”
* Using email addresses found on social networks to contact individuals is fine but the standard rules apply: treat the person fairly and openly and don’t “inquire pointlessly into someone’s personal life.”
* The Standards Editor must be consulted before contact is made with a minor.
A complete article about the NY Times and their social networking policy can be found at Econsultancy (head up courtesy of WOMMA).
I have had several insurance agency managers and owners tell me recently that they have employees who prefer to forward business emails to personal accounts because they are more comfortable with their personal email service, or they want to work at home and the agency doesn’t have or permit web mail access to the agency email.
You cannot stop agency employees from forwarding emails to themselves, but approving of the practice can create some risks for your agency.
- Emails sitting on home computers can potentially be viewed by any family member; and especially where the family includes kids, by friends of family members. It is inevitable that private client information will be contained in some of these emails. Allowing employees to forward business emails creates privacy violation possibilities.
- You have some control over viruses when employees use business email,but not so much when personal email is used. What happens when your employees’personal (business email) transmits a virus that crashes a client’s business email? The possibilities are gruesome and numerous.
- Permitting employees to forward work emails to personal accounts can allow individual employees, over time,to amass a good deal of account information in a repository outside of the agency. That provides a great big hole in any measures you may have taken to protect proprietary account information, and can make it easier for an employee leaving the agency to take accounts with them.
- What about allowing only ‘trusted employees’ to forward business email to personal accounts? Unfortunately, the precedent set can allow another ‘less trusted’ employee to forward email and then claim they didn’t realize the policy regarding forwarding emails was selective.
Employees may still forward emails, but random monitoring of outgoing email should alert you to an violations of a policy against forwarding to personal addresses.