top 3 reasons personal email should be allowed at work

I used to work for a company with a totalitarian lock-down on the internet that made the Chinese government’s attempts at online censorship seem feeble by comparison.
Literally; name a ‘category’ of website and it was likely Surf Controlled.  Everything from shopping to reference (yes, reference) was unavailable.  No banking, educational (forget about checking up on your course credits, etc) or YouTube either.  Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook?  Get real.  Health/nutritional?  Fuhgetaboutit.  
It should come as no surprise then that ‘web based email’ was out of the question.  My Gmail access therefore, was restricted to home use.  Did this stop anyone in the office from using the COMPANY email system then for PERSONAL use? 

What do you think?

Now that I’m blessed with an employer that understands the motivational impact of treating their employees as adults rather than preschoolers I’ve come to recognize three big benefits (FOR the company!) to granting access to the Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoos of this world.

Top 3 reasons personal email should be allowed at work:

1)  REDUCES USE OF COMPANY RESOURCES

In the course of almost 5 years with my former employer, I easily sent and received tens of thousands of personal emails.  This is not an exaggeration.  In addition to the simple text of ‘normal’ emails, this included massive exchanges of assorted video/sound/picture files.  If something arrived in my email box that was greater than say, 250bytes, I would typically save it off to a personal folder on the network for review later.  This easily added up to GIGABYTES of wasted space on company servers.  Now that I can use gmail at work, all storage is done in Googleland, and the company resources remain clean.

2)  LESS TIME USED FOR PERSONAL EMAIL

In the auto-update world of Microsoft Outlook, I would recieve, and typically respond to, any incoming emails immediately.  This most certainly included personal emails and resulted in a lot of time spent tending to non work-related business.  Now, I can manage my time spent on personal emails much more efficiently, by scheduling specific times of the day for personal correspondence.  Gmail isn’t always running and business critical items arn’t missed when I shut down my Gmail browser for a few hours.

3)  HAPPY EMPLOYEES ARE EFFECTIVE EMPLOYEES

I don’t even know where to begin on this one.  I suppose I can start by saying being treated like an adult (trusted to manage my time even with the ‘terrible temptation’ of personal email access) makes me want to perform like one.  Furthermore all the blockades and attempts to shut down our access to anything even remotely distracting did one thing:  motivated me (and countless others) to find ways around the system.  And ways around the system I did find, after spending plenty of company time figuring out how to do so. 

The bottom line is this; no one is going to be productive 100% of their time.  Thinking you will somehow squeeze a few extra productive minutes out of your workforce by being heavy handed with your internet restrictions is going to get you exactly two things; unhappy employees looking to ‘fight the power’ and thousands and thousands of wasted company dollars.  The choice is yours.