Seventy-nine percent percent of all employees send work emails from their personal email accounts, with 1 in 5 saying they do this on a regular basis. Awareness of the security risks this behavior poses does not act as a deterrent: 71 percent of people questioned recognize that there is an additional risk in sending work documents outside the corporate email environment, but 47 percent of these same respondents feel it is acceptable to send work emails and documents to personal email accounts anyway, according to a survey.
The most important conclusion is that IT departments worldwide are fighting a losing battle in seeking to constrain employees' behavior through policy alone. Today's information workers, or "Generation Gmail," want to be able to use email as flexibly in the workplace as they can in their personal lives. When employees are unable to work the way they want to using corporate technology, they are willing to work around these issues by using personal email accounts.
A new approach is needed in order to empower employees while protecting corporate intellectual property and ensuring regulatory compliance.
Despite the limitations imposed by corporate IT being a major driver for employees to use personal accounts, the research suggests that moving from a "controlling" to an "empowering" environment will not by itself be enough. Only 40 percent of respondents said that they would be less likely to use their personal email account for work purposes if they had an unlimited work mailbox, a figure that should seemingly be higher if the mailbox size concern was alleviated. This shows that a technological solution is also needed to ensure compliant email behavior and reduce the need to work around the limitations of corporate email.
Additional key findings of the research included:
-- 66 percent of employees responded that email is their favorite means of communication.
-- When asked what the reasons were to use personal accounts for work purposes, 71 percent responded that it was to work on documents remotely, 21 percent said it was to send files too big for their company mailbox; 18 percent wanted to take documents with them when they left a company; and 9 percent simply didn't want to carry their laptop home.
-- Only half of email workers (54 percent) say that their company has an email policy, 29 percent say there is no email policy and 1 in 6 (17 percent) don't even know.
-- At companies where email policies exist, 42 percent of these policies cover email management and only 30 percent include issues relating to email retention. Most policies are related to the appropriate use of email (88 percent) in the business.
-- 4 in 10 (40 percent) of corporate email users think that their organization's email policy could be better communicated.
-- When asked to rank their biggest frustrations with work email, 39 percent of respondents said managing mailbox contents to keep it within certain limits; 25 percent were frustrated about messages saying their mailbox was full; 17 percent felt the inability to send/receive messages when over a size limit was frustrating; 15 percent were frustrated that they had to send emails to personal accounts; and 6 percent were frustrated by having to use tools like YouSendIt to send large files.
Comment from Peter Bauer, CEO and co-founder of Mimecast: Email policies need to evolve to reflect both the high level of sophistication amongst users and the changing communications landscape within companies. Although individuals are seemingly aware of the risks of sending work documents outside the corporate email environment, this awareness is not translating into safer behavior. A significant portion of this group still believes that sending work documents to personal email accounts is acceptable. Getting employees to care about this risk is only part of the solution; employers must take responsibility for closing this disconnect through a holistic effort encompassing email systems, policy and culture. The most progressive companies will be those whose email systems and policies support the needs of both the business and its employees.
About the survey: Mimecast commissioned Loudhouse, an independent marketing research consultancy, to conduct this survey on how attitudes to corporate email use are evolving and how progressive employers are managing this core communication channel. The research comprised a total of more than 2,400 online interviews with corporate email users worldwide.
Contact: http://www.mimecast.com/GenerationGmail
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