Well, technically speaking we are bonded employees and are duty bound to report any abuse of the policies and procedures that occur in our line of work. Our business deals in insurance/risk management/securities/retirement, etc and is heavily scrutinzed with regard to our communications practices.
I do think the best thing is to ignore it.
I am a sensitivity cop, but even I would give the person one chance to say, truthfully or not, that they made a mistake, and let them know not to send that stuff to me.
I would only raise a stink if:
a) I were offended by it
or
b) if I were charged with watching out for things that would offend people
If you are HR and you received it, then yeah, a quick one-on-one conversation (on the record) needs to happen.
I agree, and how would they know if you opened up the e-mail and scrolled down to the last pic anyhow? They wouldn’t. I sometimes delete spam emails without emptying the trash can right away. I’d venture that there are some obscene images sitting in there for a few days that I never looked at. No way I’d get in trouble for receiving them and letting them sit there and not forwarding them.
Also, I’d bet that one out of every ten employees has some offensive material somewhere on their computer, if they wanted to conduct a witch-hunt they could easily weed out all the perverts tomorrow.
Sure, I’m under the same umbrella. But one of our company policies is that we’re not supposed to curse, swear or otherwise use unprofessional language at any time. That’s ridiculous. Those policies and procedures are in place to set guidelines of how the environment is to be managed and maintained, or get rid of junk.
Respond to the email: “Please don’t send sensitive material via company email. It’s against policy and could get you fired.”
Covers your ass and gives him a chance to change his scrotally unacceptable ways.
My company has a “duty to act” policy for management associates. So if I got something like that in email, I would be expected to act on it. Which is not to say “act” can’t be limited to talking to the sending associate and then documenting that I had done so in some way, which need not be in their personnel file to be considered “documented.”
My assumption would be that it wasn’t him - if this is out of character for him - and that he has a virus on his PC or someone else used it. Using that assumption will allow you to approach this as “I got something really odd and out of character from you. I know you wouldn’t send smutty emails at work, so maybe you should make sure your system virus software is up to date and that you lock your PC when you leave it.” (It may be him, and probably was, but this allows him to save face).
Lighten up Francis. Oh wait, someones already said that. If the image itself doesn’t offend you, and I can’t imagine a job where you could get in trouble for something someone sent you, I don’t see the problem.
Ah, very good, you’ve proven that you are more enlightened than anyone else in the thread. All hail the morally superior ChrisBooth12!
This is a lack of your imagination, not a lack of the possibility. Getting fired for recieving one email, I’d agree that’s unlikely. But if one person on the distribution list does report it, it’s quite reasonable that management would call everyone on the distribution in for an awkward chat. I’ve actually seen that happen. Some companies take that “these computers are for business use only” policy much more serious than others. It doesn’t sound like the OP’s company is one of the casual ones. That’s why my recommendation to the OP is for him to create an electronic paper trail that he addressed it with the sender. If the sender has any clue, he can come up with the story about a virus on his own.
I understand **snowblindfrog’s ** anxiety over what to do. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation knows they have no-tolerance policies toward inappropriate e-mails, some to the point that if management found out you’d received one and didn’t report it, you would be walked out the door with the perpetrator.
The call-center company I worked for, however, did allow for mitigating circumstances. If an inappropriate web site were opened accidentally or if such an e-mail was mistakenly sent or forwarded, people were allowed a certain margin of error. The key, however, was reporting it before management found out through other channels (like monitoring).
The actual content isn’t the question here – it’s what to do given the employer’s policies and management’s level of zeal in prosecuting such things. I’d say play it safe, see whether the friend intended to send the e-mail, determine exactly what the policies are, and go from there. If the policy allows you to ignore such an oversight, then you might consider doing so.
I worked for a very large bank as an IT geek and one of my roles was to investigate alongside HR if something like this happened.
Generally, the person sending the email would be fired. Quite often, people who received the email, but didn’t alert HR got a disciplinary note on their record. It was in their contract that they should alert their manager.
Not sure I totally agreed with this, but it’s how it was. Which reminds me of an amusing day when I had to show this very young and new HR lady about 30-odd extremely graphic male-homosexual images. To spare both our blushes, I had the bright idea of dropping the screen into 16 colours so it dithered the pictures - badly. You could make out the shapes just enough to comprehend the image, but you were spared the full-on graphic detail.
Or the time somebody accidently sent porn to a mailing list, instead of their best mate. Or the time I had to print out and sign as evidence 20-odd animal porn images. Or the time …
Yes, it happened quite a lot until word got around that we monitored for this (which was also in the T&C of the employment contract). I was quite pleased when I was initially picked as the Internal Investigation-IT contact. Not so pleased 6 months later after my tiny little mind had been irreversibly warped…
tim
Regarding the idea that one could get in trouble for receiving something like this and failing to report it…
There’s your CYA right there.
“No sir. I had no idea what was in it. If the subject line makes it look like spam, glurge, jokes, or other nonsense, into the trash bin it goes.”
Glad to see you understand what I’m talking about here. I think there are several people in this post that don’t have the vaguest idea what it’s like to work for an F100 company let alone one that operates in the finance sector. Policy and procedures are much stricter under those umbrellas. I mentioned that this individual could be fired because, the reality is, he can! That kind of punishment is common for the type of company. I have seen several employees fired for just this sort of thing. Last year 3 employees out of our Cincinnati branch were fired for this very thing. Say what you will about this policy, I didn’t write it! Now would I get into trouble for not reporting it? I don’t know. I wouldn’t expect to be fired, but as **trmatthe ** points out a disciplinary warning is not out of the question.
Joke’s on them…it’s actually a schooner.
My guess for the rationale behind this is that they want everyone working at the company to play an active role in discouraging unprofessional email use - to create an atmosphere where people don’t feel comfortable sending pornographic emails even to their best bud down the hall. Frankly, as much as I hate large corporations, I can see the point to these policies. You should be able to go eight hours without an internet porn fix. From what I’ve seen of Records Management, a company is responsible for all emails and electronic correspondence, too - emails involved in litigation are all discoverable, with major fines for not producing them. With the new Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, that’s just going to get tighter and tighter.
Hal, have you seen the picture I’m talking about? Do you have a link? I’d like to send it around to everyone I know - it’s hysterical. (Not at work, of course. Although I do work at home now, so I guess I would be sending it on the company email. 
)
It rhymes with punt.
Sorry, nope…I was just being a smartass.
“You dumb bastard. It’s not a schooner, it’s a sailboat.”