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According to the company's newest "Monster Meter" of 9,637 Europeans, only 12 percent of respondents said they would never send personal e-mails from work for fear of getting fired. And the poll further revealed that 59 percent of the site's users send personal e-mails from work on a daily basis and 21 percent say they do it several times a week. Around 8 percent of European users said they send personal e-mails from work only once a month.
Interestingly, 70 percent of Irish users say they send personal e-mails from work every day and 16 percent claim to do it several times a week. A mere 4 percent send personal messages once a month, and only 9 percent avoid the practice for fear of losing their job.
The only country to score as high as Ireland for the daily use of personal e-mail at work on Monster's chart was the Netherlands, which also scored a 70 percent rating. In third place was the UK with a score of 66 percent.
Interestingly, workers in Germany, Spain and Italy appear to be the most cautious with almost 25 percent of workers in these nations saying they are fearful that personal use of e-mail could result in dismissal. In Northern Europe, including Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, workers seem to use work e-mail for personal messages with a degree of moderation, Monster said.
"E-mail is everywhere - in the home and in the office," said Karen Kilroy, marketing manager of Monster.ie. "Using work e-mail for your own private correspondence could be seen as abusing company property, but most companies tend to overlook this practice as long as personal e-mails are kept to a minimum."
Yet the abuse of a company's Internet resources can be a serious problem for businesses, and perhaps a bigger concern for employees. One recent case of Internet abuse concerned the highly publicised sacking of two Scottish Hewlett-Packard employees, and the suspension of 150 more in the UK and Ireland, for accessing inappropriate adult material.
And more examples abound, including the State of Washington Department of Labor's announcement that it will make public the e-mails of employees who abuse the system. Also in the US, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. fired two employees for forwarding sexually explicit e-mail to co-workers. Notably, a US District Court in Massachusetts has ruled that the worker e-mails were in fact not private messages.
Indeed there are more concerns at stake for employers than simply time-wasting by employees. Abuse of e-mail, with regard to sexuality explicit, racist or threatening content, could put a company at risk of facing a lawsuit from offended workers. Also, the downloading of massive music and video files could slow bandwidth and impact multiple employees in an office.
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