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One of the biggest time wasters in todays office environment is personal emails during work time. Its a hard one for employers to police without infringing on employee’s privacy as well and many ethical questions are raised around this area.

From my own experience I would recommend that most employers and employees attempt to operate on a give and take theory, sure its ok for you to email your friend in work time, however don’t complain about responding to a work matter in your own time, that’s what I am getting at.

If you are an employee attempt to give more than you take, most employers are not stupid and if they can see that you often put in that little extra, having a bit of fun at work should not be to much of a problem.

Things however to remember if you are an employee and use your work email for personal messages amoungst colleagues and friends..

• Be careful what you say - it’s possible that whatever you say could be passed on and perhaps even to the person you may be talking about.
• Try to give more than you take - keep the balance in your favor, that way you also have a good argument if you ever get confronted about it.
• Don’t over do it - if you are going to spend hours pouring over a personal email and not doing your work the chances are you will get into trouble.
• Try to save your personal emails for home time - if someone sends you a joke, consider forwarding it to your home email and checking it out later.

Now this is is just a few tips and the beginning of what could be quite a discussion on this subject, we are interested to hear your views from both an employee and employer perspective, so why not leave us a comment about your experiences.

Now for something funny have a look what happened to this lady when she was busy playing around instead of working…