Disciplining Inter-Employee Social Conduct

An interesting situation was discussed with me recently by a friend, and it got me to thinking more about it; so I thought I’d post to get additional insights/feedback from the community.

With the rise of remote work, employees have become increasingly reliant on chat platforms (Teams, Skype, etc.) and email for daily communication. This shift has provided employers with detailed and potentially permanent records of interactions—a level of surveillance that many employees didn’t encounter in traditional office settings. While monitoring such things as clocking in, tracking internet usage, or even recording keystrokes has long existed in some workplaces, remote work has transformed communication into a consistently logged activity. For remote employees, almost everything they say is documented, whether through chat logs or email threads. While Zoom calls might occasionally escape this scrutiny, the majority of workplace interactions now have the potential for “permanent oversight.”

This reality raises critical questions about how employers should handle disciplining employees for social conduct. In the United States, where most workers are at-will employees and can be terminated at any time for non-protected reasons, the implications are particularly significant.

The need to respond to certain types of speech are straightforward and necessary, IMO—hate speech, for instance, should always lead to disciplinary action. Other forms of speech, such as discussing salaries, are explicitly protected under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and cannot legally be punished. However, a lot of workplace communication exists in a gray area that is harder to define.

Consider an example: two employees privately discuss a recent promotion. One says, “Looks like they value tenure over competence,” to which the other replies, “Yeah, just 10 more years of mediocrity, and I’ll be at the top too.” These kinds of casual remarks about management or coworkers are not uncommon. In a traditional office setting, such comments would likely fade into obscurity, overheard by few and forgotten soon after. In a remote environment, however, they are logged and could be revisited indefinitely. There could be “flags” associated with company software to ferret out such criticisms of company leaders.

Now imagine these same employees also suggest in a chat that everyone should share their salaries. HR notices this and flags their accounts for review, uncovering that the employees have been privately comparing salaries with colleagues—an activity protected under the NLRA. During the review, HR also stumbles upon a handful of sarcastic or critical remarks about management spanning years. Armed with this record, the company might justify disciplinary action by citing a supposed history of negativity, even though the true motivation could be discomfort with the salary discussions. Officially, the issue becomes the tone of their comments, but in reality, it stems from protected activity.

This kind of selective enforcement could extend to any number of arbitrary or unfair reasons an employer might not want someone around. Explicit or implicit biases, such as sexism or racism, are legitimate concerns. Additionally, remote employees are at a particular disadvantage—they can’t rely on an offhand, in-person remark being forgotten. In remote work, almost everything said is preserved, which makes every word a potential liability.

Many workers are now hyper-conscious of this surveillance. Some avoid searching personal queries on work devices or while connected to company Wi-Fi, fearing that their activity might be tracked. The growing sense of being constantly monitored has also raised concerns about private communication among coworkers. For example, an employee might consider creating a private Discord server to talk with just a group of colleagues who they consider friends outside of work, but they would need to weigh the risks. If management were to discover such a chat room and it was considered a way to bypass being monitored, they could likely justify a termination, even without a clear breach of policy.

How have you approached the reality of this “eternal” storage of communication data? Have you made efforts to keep your professional and personal lives separate? What strategies can employees use to navigate this environment, where management can use plausible reasons for discipline while masking deeper, less acceptable motivations?

Thanks in advance for any responses!

5 Likes

As someone working fully remote this is definitely something I’ve thought about. I try to limit what I type in chat to coworkers to something I would be ok with everyone at the company seeing (I don’t always succeed there). I have definitely deleted comments after typing them out because the comment wasn’t worth the risk, even if I was just trying to send it to one person. I also have a habit of posting comments in the wrong chat window and accidently sending the message to a group of people instead of one person, so that has made me cautious too.

As far as your employer using your chat history to fire you, I don’t know how concerned I am about that for me specifically. I feel like as an Actuary I have job security and could leave and get another full time job with higher pay without too much struggle or down time. If my employer wants me gone that bad then I probably don’t want to be there either. I admit I’m viewing this from an incredibly privileged lens where I don’t worry about getting the next job.

The only thing I use my work computer for is work.

Everything else is on my personal devices including friendly chats with coworkers. For example my coworkers and I use WeChat, not Teams, for chatting.

4 Likes

Don’t put anything into a work email or Teams that you wouldn’t mind being discussed during a performance review, or appearing as a New York Times headline.

6 Likes

Agreed, also that you wouldn’t want to discuss during a deposition.

But if I went by the deposition standard, I’d never use Teams or email. :smiley:

4 Likes

It is indeed scary but it’s also easier to avoid using company resources. In 2003 when I joined AO I was using my work computer to access it. I worked onsite and smart phones didn’t exist. I also used my work email for personal stuff.

Now I use personal devices for personal stuff and work devices for work stuff.

That said, yeah, you do have to be careful about random comments to coworkers.

As long as you’re not flagged though, your employer’s legal department wants to purge a lot of stuff as quickly as they can as this stuff is also discoverable. The less they retain the less that’s discoverable. So while they CAN keep anything indefinitely, in all probability the obviously self-deprecating comment about “just 10 more years of mediocrity…” is unlikely to be flagged and stored. It’s probably going to disappear into the ether 30-90 days after deletion.

Unfortunately, using work chat/email for anything but the most sterile and safe communications opens you up to liability. If higher-ups want to come down on you for any reason, they’ll likely find it. I’ve seen work chat used as a post-facto way to explain the punishment that was desired.

Of course most of us will probably be fine, our employer won’t be scouring through our history to find infractions. But if they wanted to get you for some reason, or if they have flags set for certain things, it’s a possibility.

Conversations in a chat can be (and occasionally are) misinterpreted. Context is really important, and critical details may not be apparent. I’ll kill my wife if she brings home another pet may be understood to everyone as sarcasm, frustration or being slightly miffed; someone else may just read those words and think he’s literally going to kill her if she brings home another pet, her life is clearly in danger. It’s like if someone has a baseball bat in their trunk; one may wonder are they going to use that as a weapon against someone else? - but put a baseball and a glove with it, and it becomes oh, they must be playing baseball somewhere.

It’s that way with work-related chats, but perhaps more so. You may point out work repeatedly sending e-mails with “click here for more details” and there’s no hyperlink, or it leads to a 404, or to a “you don’t have permission to view this” and ask how difficult is it to make sure this works before sending it out to the whole company? as a rhetorical question / expression of frustration / highlight of absurdity; someone at work filtering through chats may read it as belittling or insulting others. Do you really want to have to sit and think how could someone else perceive this in an offensive way before you type something in to a work chat? Probably not, but you also want to be able to express your thoughts and commiserate with others from time to time without constantly having to look over your shoulder.

That leads to the “out of work” chat where you purportedly can have those comments, because it’s not using the company’s resources - but is that still something work has the ability to ask about and/or investigate if it becomes aware? Ignoring “let’s do something illegal” remarks, do workplace standards have to extend to chats that occur outside company resources if/when any of those discussions take place during company hours? I want to be able to talk to others, make connections with those who don’t work in the office, feel a sense of team and build rapport and have a pulse of what’s going on, but I don’t want well, work can still ask to cause that to become robotic and sterile.

1 Like

Nice hack.
(goes to get a ball and glove…)

4 Likes

As you say, the ability to criticize your employer is crucial. Every office needs the water cooler or the cafeteria for employees to casually let off steam and vent about things that are technically negative about the company.

Those things might be serious, such as your salary, or it might be as small as the air conditioning being off. Like @Ted_Hoffman, HR is something I’d commonly like to complain about, but that’s doubly treacherous on work chat when HR is logging everything.

I just went and checked our company chat, and I have stuff clear back from 2022 still (I didn’t bother to check before that). As far as I know, there’s no policy for deleting old chats. Maybe they’ll implement something like that someday.

I meant 30-90 days after you delete it. Of course the recipient(s) would probably also have to delete, depending on the platform.

1 Like

Wow, we had a 2 week limit on teams chats, which might have been lengthened to 4 weeks. 6 month retention on email, you have to justify keeping anything longer.

Now a cynic would say HR keeps it all forever. Legal discovery is the biggest business answer to why they don’t. But really, if they want to can you they don’t need a 6 mo+ paper trail.

2 Likes

Our chats are not saved more than a few days. Oddly, Teams will send a chat to email if it thinks you haven’t seen it. Email can be kept up to a year.

Our chat was kept for a few weeks. I forget whether it was one month or three months. But we got regular reminders that anything in chat that ought to be retained as a business record had to be copied onto a platform with a longer retention, like email.

By default, emails were retained for 3 months, but you could assign a longer retention to a folder or to an individual email.

My employer was very worried about discovery. Which is funny, because they were very concerned with following all the laws and regulations, and overwhelmingly acted in good faith towards claimants.

Yeah we have the option to keep emails longer… valuation actuaries & accountants absolutely have to be able to go back more than one year for annual statement work. You have to see what was done last year.

But you have to proactively move the emails to a place where they’ll be retained longer or in 90 days it’s gone.

Heh, i was working on reserving asbestos claims. I was literally estimating how much we expected to owe on policies written in the 1950s through the mid 1980s. We successfully lobbied for a retention of 50 years for much of our work. (Policy forms weren’t within our purview. Oh, and yes, we often paid claims on possible policies for which there was minimal evidence. Welcome to asbestos liability.)

3 Likes

I recall arguing with the records department about why we needed to keep pfiles for single premium permanent products that hadn’t resulted in claims yet but were still in force.

They equated “still in force” with “paid premium in the last 7 years” which was true for a lot of products but not all.

We did end up paying a few questionable claims on decades old policies for whom the files had been destroyed. Fortunately the amounts were tiny. Like … under $1,000 in most cases.

2 Likes

Back to something in the original post:

:popcorn: