Keeping personal and work emails separate is super important!

There are two good reasons to keep your personal and work emails separate, privacy and accessibility. Now we can debate the meaning of the word “private” when it comes to emails for a long, long time; this is not a post about that topic. Rather, the “private” is meant to indicate who can look at the content of your emails.

When you use a service like Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail, you’re basically getting the service of email for free in exchange for the ability to have marketing aimed at you from the content of your emails. You can read more about that here if you like. But in theory, you’re the one creating the account, you set the password, and you decide what devices are used to access the account and these choices make it “private”. Anything you feel comfortable sharing in text in an email is only accessible on your end by you, and probably not your employer.

When you are given an email address at a company you work for, chances are you’re agreeing to a bunch of things when you use that email, like you’re an agent of that company, that you will only use the email for work related things and that you’ll keep it secure.

But as time passes, and relationships change, it can be easy for the two worlds to overlap. Without realizing it, you might start emailing your doctors office from your work email because that’s the email you deal with all day. Or maybe you’ve developed a personal relationship with someone you met at work, but they always used the work email address because that’s how you met.

This is the accessibility part of email account. Sometimes it’s just easier to use one account over another! But this can lead to problems when you change jobs or lose access to a work account for one reason or another. What happens when all the things you wrote to someone over the course of a career at one job could disappear in just a few seconds?

As an employer, what if you suddenly didn’t want someone to have access to all of your company’s data? What if you hadn’t given that person their own account within your company and half your work was in their personal email account? Well, the best way to avoid being faced with that issue is never to have it in the first place by being diligent about keeping the two types of accounts completely separate from day one.

Happily, the G Suite from Google allows even small business to offer the power of administered email account with your own domain to their employees or sub-contractors. Best of all, the first two weeks of using it are free. But mostly it allows a business to control who has access to what and where they have that access. And that can be priceless when relationships between employees and employers change, not always for the better. WorkSite has started many of these types of accounts, and we’d be happy to help set one up for you as well.