Sarah Burness's Blog: Edited: 3 Reasons Not To Overlap Business And Personal Emails

Have you wondered how many employees use their personal email accounts for work purposes? Who uses their work email for personal reasons? An anonymous survey has helped answer these questions and more about business and personal email usage, but one question remained: Is using your work and personal emails interchangeably a bad thing?

The short answer is yes, business email accounts and personal email accounts should remain separate in most cases. Currently, 38.8% of people living in the U.S. allow their email usage to overlap at least some of the time. Here are three great reasons why keeping your emails separate is the smart choice.

It’s Unprofessional

Unprofessionalism with business and personal email accounts is twofold. First, communicating personal life through a work email usually means you are doing so on company time. This is a poor use of your time, and disrespectful to your employer. Instead of using work downtime to put yourself at risk by being unprofessional, get up, take a short walk, and get a breath of fresh air. If you are asked by your boss why you aren’t at your desk, ask if there is anything they need to be done. Offering to help with the extra workload is a great way to shine at work.

Secondly, if you are the employer, or a freelancer, using your personal email for business can be disorganized, allowing more room for miscommunication and missed emails altogether. Junk mail alone accounts for too much of our personal inboxes, clouding the space for efficient communication. Not to mention potential customers noticing your email is JohnSmithGOSTEELERS@gmail.com is likely not going to look great unless you do work for that football team.

Tip: Best email addresses for work include the business name, such as JohnSmith@windowinstal.com. Not only do your customers know exactly who they are dealing with, but they also see your company name anytime they contact you. It’s advertising in a simple form.

It’s a Security Risk

Adults under 35 and over 65 are more likely to use their personal email for work-related communication. For business security, this is risky. The more files get transferred to and from these emails, the more likely they are to become susceptible to viruses and other malicious activity. Not to mention your company cannot insist on the security of your personal email. Therefore, they have no way of ensuring protection against possible threats. Using personal email for work is an unassumed risk your boss may not be too happy about. Consider business security especially before forwarding any sensitive information and exercise extra caution if you’ve signed any document preventing you from sharing information. The last thing you want is to be the employee responsible for leaked or lost information.

It Reduces Your Privacy

Communicating personally through your work email is risky business for you. Chances are good that the IT department has the ability to see and report on everything that happens via work computers, including your email. That spicy photo you just sent to your girlfriend may have been spotted. Even worse, if you’re job hunting and communicating with possible future employers and you get caught – goodbye current paying gig!

Let’s say that no one says anything to you about the unprofessional emails you’ve been sending or receiving from your desk. This doesn’t mean they have gone unnoticed. When the time comes for a promotion or raise, those mistakes may come back to haunt you. This is a case where the best policy is to keep work at work and home at home.

Fact: Men are more likely to use personal email for work communication, use their work email for a personal login, and to forward work emails to their personal accounts.

If these reasons aren’t enough to scare you out of using your personal and business emails interchangeably, consider your work-life balance. If you use your personal email for work business, you are never far away from work or coworkers and trust us, they don’t care if you’re on vacation. Vice versa, your great aunt Margaret can’t pester you about attending the family reunion while you’re at work if she doesn’t have your work email. Keeping your work life separate is the key to sanity, we promise.