March 04, 2003
Clueless
Yesterday, an employee of the steel cord company Bekaert was sacked over a bad practical joke distributing some spoofed adult cartoons figuring his colleagues and bosses. Apparently, he took some pictures and used these to "personalize" some flesh-intensive scenes, distributing the result by email afterwards. Admittedly, that move wasn't particularly smart. The result however is quite startling in my opinion: being utterly clueless and absolutely paternalistic, the company fired him right away. 1600 colleagues of him are now on strike. Talk about clueless? Mind you, this is a company which virtually owns the entire city its HQs are located in, and has been cut quite some slack over the years by local gouvernment in terms of zoning, polution and whatnot. But anyway, I won't digress on my opinions about large companies ;-)
It appears the Belgian legislation, as one of the first in Europe, has already adopted some regulation towards the use of electronic communication (email and web) for private matters during working hours, which seems quite fair to me:
- using email for private stuff is allowed given reasonal boundaries
- monitoring is allowed:
- but it must be done globally
- rules with regards to abuse must be communicated prior to monitoring
- you can't single out people, but only act on obvious deviations