Organizations may suffer serious losses resulting from an inability to take action against wrongdoers, and an inability to defend themselves adequately against legal actions, some of which may be based on questionable evidence. Legal, compliance officers and records managers must ensure email doesn’t become a corporate liability and should have best practices in place to respond to email retrieval requests regarding investigations into employment disputes and audit and compliance related procedures.
The Implications of Employment Law
Email may be admitted as evidence in civil action lawsuits so organizations need to consider the practical issues this raises. These include taking steps to enhance the reliability of email evidence, to manage the storage of email effectively and to have appropriate controls in place regarding its use.
The most common subject matter of employee grievance is often harassment and bullying, a big problem in many organizations. Other common causes of grievances are line manager relations; pay related issues, hours of work (including rotas and shifts) and terms and conditions.
Since 2009, more than 90% of disputes between organizations and current or former employees have included email as part of the evidence. (Source: Enterprise Strategy Group)
In the US, legal disputes are of most concern due to their financial impact to organizations. (Source: Fulbright Litigation Trends Survey 2010)
In disputes with former employees, organizations often settle due to lack of evidence. Email could have been used.
By Guest Blogger: C2C Inc.
