Since last March, many people, including me, have started working remotely in an effort to avoid catching or spreading the novel coronavirus. I have not set foot in my office on campus since March 13 of last year, just before we were about to have a week off for spring break.
Instead of a break, however, many of us used spring break week to offer voluntary classes to students over Zoom, the platform we were shifting to to teach remotely for the rest of the semester. Partly this move helped to keep students connected even when they couldn't return to campus. But a real benefit for those of us teaching who had limited experience using Zoom was to enable us to get used to the platform and see how we could use it most effectively to reconfigure the in-person courses we had been teaching. That increased familiarity certainly helped as online learning continued through fall and into the following spring.
We were not alone in our Zoom usage during this time period. On a blog post to users last April, Zoom's CEO Eric S. Yuan reported that usage of his company's product had shot up dramatically. We may have gone virtual, but we are certainly in good company.
During this time of learning to to teach virtually, several readers have emailed me to some version of this question: "Is it wrong to use the Zoom account I have via my employer for personal use?"
Most recently, I got this inquiry from a college professor who explained that last year she used her employer's Zoom account mostly for work with the exception of the few times she used it for personal use including giving presentations and attending a memorial service. She prefers her college's Zoom account because her free personal account limits meetings to 40 minutes.
I believe that companies who want their employees to get comfortable using Zoom for business purposes would be wise to encourage their employees to use the company's Zoom account for personal meetings as long as they don't use it for illegal or abusive activity. But ultimately it's up to a company to make its usage policy clear, just as it is a company's call whether to permit employees to use company email or a company computer to browse non-work-related websites.
If a company is going to require employees to work remotely, the right thing is for them to lay out the ground rules for employees about Zoom usage up front.
Employees should remember, however, that if they use a company's Zoom account, it's more than likely that a company IT person can review usage and meeting activity, just like IT ca review company email usage. If employees use their company Zoom accounts responsibly, I still believe that the right thing for companies to do is to let them but to make clear that it's OK and what restrictions, if any, they should follow.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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