you've got mail …

Lots and lots of it, no doubt. And so do all of your employees.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Few would argue that e-mail and Internet access haven't changed our lives for the better. Who would have thought 10 years ago that we'd be sitting at our keyboards pinging urgent messages back and forth at lightning speed, that we could track shipments anywhere in the world at the touch of a button, or collect reports and time sheets at the click of a mouse?

Yet there's a flip side too. That same effortless access to the digital world can lead to abuse of office e-mail systems and Internet connections, causing a raft of problems for the company. They include:

• System overload. We tend to think of cyberspace as a vast and infinite thing (which it is), conveniently forgetting that the circuitry that connects all of our computers to that great vast unknown has a decidedly finite capacity. No matter how capacious your company's servers—the computers that function as the in-box for all incoming information, routing and processing the data—or how high speed your Internet connections, you're still likely to encounter congestion at rush hour.
  Generally speaking, it's not business correspondence—or even personal e-mail messages—that's jamming up the servers. It's the relentless stream of on-line newsletters, chain letters, jokes and spam that if left unchecked, slows things to a crawl. Pretty soon, you're finding that the delivery tracking reports you used to call up in seconds are taking minutes. To head off this problem, you can put gate-keeping measures in place. Have your IT department erect firewalls and install filtering software that will siphon off a lot of that spam before it reaches your e-mail boxes.
• Liability. Do you know what your staff members are looking at online? The same managers who take great pains to block their kids from viewing Web sites with objectionable content rarely give so much as a thought to their staff. After all, they're adults and this is a free country, right? Yes, but as an employer, it's your responsibility to protect your employees from exposure to offensive material. Turning a blind eye to their surfing habits could leave your company wide open to sexual harassment complaints. The fix? Make sure your company institutes and enforces policies against using company computers and software to view, download, duplicate, create, transfer (and any other verbs your attorneys can come up with) offensive material. And don't be sidetracked by arguments that people hold differing views on what's offensive. This is about the separation of business and personal life. Keep it about business.
• Lost productivity. How much work is getting done if your staff members are online comparison shopping, playing games or checking the latest sports scores? Or for that matter, reading all of those joke e-mails or responding to messages from long-lost friends who tracked them down on classmates.com? Could this be why that supervisor can never seem to complete those reports on time? Taking a break is not a criminal offense, but you need to make sure that workers aren't going over the line. If you don't feel you can count on your staff 's good judgment or self control, it might be time to look into monitoring software.

E-mail is as necessary to doing business these days as the phone on your desk and the fax machine down the hall. And it's just as perilous. Twenty years ago, we worried that staff members would abuse their access to long-distance phone service. Ten years ago, we worried about fax machines. Now, it's e-mail and Internet access. Pay attention … and think about the business implications the next time you hear: "You have 136 new messages!"