It was a tough year for corporate America. Enough said about Covid, resignations, work-from-home. The year closed with a story on the risks of allowing employees to communicate using apps and message services on personal devices. The Washington Post title says it all: “JPMorgan fined $200 million for allowing employees to do business on WhatsApp, private devices”. Heading into 2022, is there any hope for organizations beleaguered by communications risk and struggling to make work a better and more productive environment?

JP Morgan is one of many institutions under constant scrutiny as a financial institution and subject to strict regulation regarding company records. The company had a policy forbidding the use of these apps for business, but did not monitor, save the records, or enforce its own policy. They are undoubtedly not the only organization that needs to do better, but due to the extraordinary supervisory authority that the SEC has, they were caught.

Many other types of organizations are in similar situations: banks, law firms, accounting firms, pharmaceutical companies, professional services firms, medical companies, any organization handling personal information. Just about every company has restrictions not only on what they must manage as business records irrespective of media, but on how they do and or do not allow communications among and between employees and clients. Most companies evolved without thinking into their current state, and as we all know, once you get used to mobile device texting, WhatsApp, Jabber, Signal, Teams, etc., most employees don’t want to operate without them in the workplace or outside of it.

Almost all institutions are getting pressure to allow interpersonal communications on firm devices. After all, we are well into the age of social media and one-to-one non-voice communications. It’s hard to set limits after that is the common expectation, or to control or distinguish what gets passed between firm servers and personal accounts.

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As much as we all love that marvelous ability to snark in the background via text and conduct side chats during work meetings, there is risk in that ability for any organization that condones the interpersonal chatting. What is allowed, what isn’t? Do clients see this quick-and-easy communication as a necessary part of their relationship? Does it constitute any violation of insider trading or privacy restrictions if information is passed outside the firm, or even between employees? Who has the time to monitor this much mostly content-free chatter? What about employee satisfaction in the workplace? And what about productivity? So far, artificial intelligence can’t keep up with our human ability to communicate meaning without formal language, and humans must take these considerations and figure the risk/reward potential for the organization.

A deciding factor in the “do we or don’t we” for WhatsApp, Signal, texting with clients, etc. may be the institution’s ability to set up policies and training to ensure that its people know the norms for device and social media use. Does the employee need to capture screen shots of IMs with clients? Keep all texts on personal devices? Use only encrypted texting? And where in God’s server farm is all this kept? Another aspect of decision-making in allowing chat and texting might be whether the organization has enough information maturity and capability to manage and secure the inevitable accumulation of required records – can IT keep up with the storage and migration requirements, and know when to dispose of the data?

Each organization must decide for itself what value instant messaging and texting brings to either its internal teamwork or to its relationship to clients and the outside world. Many may decide that internal communication is essential to smooth inner teamwork and leads to better internal camaraderie. If so, choose the right tool with proper review and put proper safeguards in place. As always, risk mitigation begins with good information governance policies and staff training on acceptable use, as well as proper oversight and enforcement. After all, not all organizations have a spare $200 million lying around…