An email policy for ajax industries

Human Resource Management [The of the will appear here] [The of the will appear here] [The of the [Course] [Date] Case Study: An email policy for Ajax Industries I partly agree with the response provided by the writer. I agree to the point that emails are an important source of communication within an organization. However, I do not agree that employees should be able to communicate their personal feelings and words through office emails. The office personnel are free to use their own personal emails for this purpose. Using corporate emails for the purpose of exchanging negative and even positive communication is unprofessional and thus should be frowned down upon (Spirit HR, 2011). It would furthermore add to the amount of emails that employees receive during the office hours, which in turn would impact the productivity of the employees. Employees would be wasting precious office time in sorting and reading personal emails on corporate ids. In this way, they may ignore or delete important email that is more urgent that personal emails. When the employees are being paid by the hour or even by the day, this practice seems unprofessional and even unethical (LeGault, 2002). Moreover, the writer is correct in pointing out that Ajax Industries should develop a corporate policy towards the exchange of personal emails on corporate ids. In this era, when internet is taking over the world, it has become more and more important for organization to align their policies with the latest technologies. Even though many organizations have fully developed IT departments in their organization, they often fail to develop a strong policy about the usage and freedom of this technology (Walsh, 2012). Same is the case with Ajax Industries. Their policies have not been properly developed. The company needs to deal with this issue as soon as possible; otherwise they risk being faced with such cumbersome issues in the future also. Another possible solution presented by the writer is to monitor the emails of the employees. The organization can only monitor the emails if the employees use corporate emails for their usage. However, the writer goes on to say that the employees should be allowed to exchange private emails. If employees exchange private emails over corporate ids, and this could be monitored by the organization and it would raise privacy issues for the employees as well as ethical issues for the organization (Brown, 1994). It would also raise ethical issues for the organization as they would be going over the employee’s personal effects and may use it for their own advantage at some point of time. The best solution here would be to develop a corporate policy towards the use of emails and to enforce rules that prevent private exchange over company provided email ids. Case Study: A Premiership or a Scandal I partly agree with this answer. The writer has been able to identify the legal and HR issues involved in the case but have failed to properly identify the ethical issues present within the case. Ethical issues within a case are issues that are not liable in the court of law but are not morally right when carried out by the organization. In this case, the writer believes that the decision of the board is an ethical issue when it is a legal issue. It is the legal responsibility of the board to respond to serious charges by the women which they are ignoring. However, the ethical issue in this case is the fact that the management is siding with its players, even though it is well aware of the fact that the players under question could have performed rape on the woman. They are not bringing the players under questioning and taking any strict action by considering the impact of the story of the image of the club. The issue of sexual harassment is a legal issue that the writer has taken to be an ethical issue. Also another ethical issue that the writer fails to address is the management’s duty to provide an environment where such activities do not occur (Killion and Dempski, 2000). The management in the case of the Football Club provided an opportunity for players to use the party for their sexual advantage. Also the management seems less inclined to help out the woman and more inclined towards the image of the incident on the football club and their chances of winning. The writer has been correct to point out the legal issue in this case which is the issue of sexual harassment. Furthermore, the writer has also given examples of legal cases of sexual harassment which provides depth to the answer and highlights the knowledge of the writer. However, the writer has not focused on the actual law concerned with sexual harassment. The writer should have made a reference to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)’s publication, ‘ Policy Guidance on Current Issues of Sexual Harassment’ (Adler and Peirce, 1993) when discussing this issue. The HR issues in this particular case refer to how the employees treat the situation and make room for further policies and actions. If the HR managers do not condone such behaviour, they would risk the issue of repeat incidents (Snell and Bohlander, 2012). The writer however, did not point out this aspect of the case. The writer also did not discuss the liabilities that the club would face as a result of the inappropriate action of the players; this includes appropriately responding to the woman and the complete information about the situation (Anon., 2005) References Adler, R. and Peirce, E. 1993, The Legal, Ethical, and Social Implications of the “ Reasonable Woman” Standard in Sexual Harassment Cases, Fordham Law Review, Volume 61, Issue 4 Anon, 2005, Sexual Harassment Essentials of Prevention and Response, Connecticut: Business & Legal Reports, Inc. Brown, B. 1994, 27 June, Companies own email and can monitor it, USA: Computerworld Killion, S. and Dempski, K. 2000, Legal and Ethical Issues, New York: Jones & Bartlett Learning LeGault, A. 2002. Fairness in the Workplace, Canada: CCH Canadian Limited Snell, S. and Bohlander, G. 2012. Managing Human Resources, Ohio: Cengage Learning Spirit HR. 2011. It’s a matter of policy – the importance of email and internet policy, Retrieved from http://www. spirit-hr. co. uk/news_details. aspx? id= 44 Walsh, D. 2012. Employment Law for Human Resource Practice, Ohio: Cengage Learning