As a sign of just how co-mingled our private and business lives have become, the U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear a case regarding the privacy (or lack thereof) of personal text messages transmitted by a California police officer over a device owned by his employer, the City of Ontario. According to an article in USA Today, “Ontario city officials are appealing a lower court’s decision that a police department violated a sergeant’s constitutional protection against unreasonable searches when it reviewed his texts, some of them sexually explicit.”
For decades, everyone pretty well understood the de facto standard to be that “work time was for work.” Translation – whatever took place during working hours on the employer’s premises/property, or when conducting business for the employer was expected to be work related, and that there were very few, if any, rights to privacy, or even ownership of one’s thoughts and ideas, if conceived at work. At the same time, one’s off duty hours were their own, and but for an infrequent, quick phone call, if you wanted to interrupt someone’s time off, you were expected to pay for it.
And then along came Jones, ‘er the cellphone, the laptop, globalization, always-on connectivity, and the expectation that workers of every stripe could be reached out to any time, anywhere. And reach out we did (and still do). Though unspoken, until now, the operating premise has been that is generally okay for workers to carry on personal business at work in an amount roughly equivalent to the degree that they are called upon to involve themselves in work activities during their “off hours.” It’s an uneasy truce, but a truce nevertheless.
To date, there have been only two lines in the sandbox: 1) That there should be no appreciable extra cost associated with the cross-over activities, and 2) That the law is still the law, and normal standards of decency still apply. In other words, whereas it’s probably alright to take a few minutes to order a new pair of shoes online at Zappos.com from your employer’s computer, it’s not okay to engage in online gambling or look at salacious images.
So where do we go?
As for the court case, my bet is that, despite a right-leaning bench, the Court will side with the cop, if only for the reason that employees were required to reimburse the city if they exceeded allowable text character limits.
More broadly speaking, I see organizations going in a couple of different directions. Some will undoubtedly take steps to further delineate via policy, what the rights and expectations are. Given the untrusting, transactional nature of the relationship in many workplaces, the new deal could bring about further unbundling of the relationship. In an increasing number of cases, the devices (phones, pagers, pda’s) will be owned by the worker while the voice/data plan will be reimbursed by the employer. With regard to the broader co-mingling of personal and business activities, some of these organizations will prescribe varying time limits that they and their employees can “bother one another” during the course of the day.
Realizing that it’s good for people to regularly unplug from their jobs, some organizations will take a step back and actually encourage workers to just turn the damned thing off when they’re at home and don’t want to be bothered, and instruct their bosses to leave them alone.
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A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows
