Are you here looking for ways to monitor employee email?

Well, look no further!

In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to use Gmail or Google Workspace to monitor employee email, as well as how to monitor employee email in Outlook. 😀

How to Monitor Employee Gmail and Google Workspace Accounts

If you’re here to learn how to monitor employee email in Google Workspace, specifically through Gmail, the best option available is our namesake email monitoring tool, EmailAnalytics.

Yeah, I’m #biased, but hang with me for a second 😉

EmailAnalytics is designed for Gmail and Google Workspace. It lets you monitor your own email activity, or the activities of your employees or team members.

Your high-level dashboard will show you how many emails you’ve sent or received, how many conversations you’ve engaged in, and other basic Gmail metrics.

emailanalytics

You can also use EmailAnalytics to find out email response times.

How long it does it take your employees to respond to emails, on average? And how long they tend to wait for a response?

top interactions

How to Get Started

To start monitoring employee email using EmailAnalytics, sign up for a free trial.

Then, check out this knowledge base article on how to add team members to your account.

After you add employees to your account, you’ll be able to track their analytics from your dashboard.

user report

After signing up for the free trial, you can start monitoring employee emails in Gmail or Google Workspace immediately; your email data will populate into your dashboard immediately and automatically.

From there, you can regularly check in and see how things are progressing, or you can schedule daily or weekly summaries to be sent to you via email with the metrics that matter to you.

daily summary

The number-crunching all happens in the background, so your job is easy.

How to Monitor Employee Email in Outlook

EmailAnalytics is also compatible with Outlook! Start a free trial to see your Outlook email analytics within 60 seconds.

Check out our list of the best options for Outlook email analytics.

For basic Outlook email monitoring and productivity scores for your team, you can also consider Microsoft Viva, which will help you monitor your productivity in Outlook and across other Microsoft products.

Microsoft’s MyAnalytics

Here, you’ll see metrics related to how you spend your time, including hours you spend emailing, in meetings, and focusing on other work. You’ll also see a breakdown of what percentage of emails have been read, and the average response time for received emails.

Viva also has a recommended list of contacts you haven’t engaged with in a while, so you can follow up and stay in touch.

There’s also an opportunity to set goals, and measure your progress against those goals.

For example, you might set a target to meet for fewer than 10 hours in the upcoming week, then look into the meetings that helped you meet that goal (or the ones that pulled you away from it).

Viva isn’t as robust as EmailAnalytics when it comes to email monitoring; you won’t have visibility into quite as many email-related metrics.

However, it offers a succinct, high-level view of your employees’ email habits, and other work habits.

If you’re committed to Outlook, it’s a solid platform to have in your toolkit.

How to Get Started

If you’re already a customer of Office 365 Enterprise E5, you already have access to Viva. Otherwise, you can sign up for $4 per user, per month. Integration only takes a few minutes.

By the way, if you’re considering whether to go with G Suite or Office 365, we’ve got a thorough comparison of G Suite vs. Office 365 you should check out.

6 Reasons To Monitor Employee Email Activity

Following are just some of the advantages of monitoring employee email:

1. Evaluate and balance employee workloads.

You’ll quickly learn their responsibilities and where/how they spend their time on email. Employees who send and receive more emails per day will generally have a bigger workload than their counterparts.

Then, you can redistribute responsibilities in a way that’s fairer, or more appropriate for your employees. Ultimately, that means a happier and more productive team.

2. Identify problematic clients (or internal contacts).

You may learn that some of your clients are more demanding than you thought. For example, you might notice that one client sends far more emails to your employees than any other, despite paying the same amount for your services.

Improve your team's email response time by 42.5% With EmailAnalytics

  • 35-50% of sales go to the first-responding vendor.
  • Following up within an hour increases your chances of success by 7x.
  • The average professional spends 50% of their workday on email.

TRY IT FREE

In extreme cases, you may need to step in and ask for a more reasonable communication pattern, or for an additional management fee.

Similarly, you may find that some employees send an excessive number of unnecessary emails; this is your chance to correct that behavior.

3. Measure employee performance.

You can use employee email monitoring as one gauge of performance. While the sheer number of emails an employee sends may send mixed messages (i.e., it could be a sign of sending too many emails or a sign of doing lots of work), there are secondary metrics that can help you figure out how well an employee is doing.

For example, you can look at email response time to determine how attentive an employee is, or judge their ability to communicate based on how long it takes them to write or read emails.

4. Identify strengths and weaknesses.

With the right metrics, you can also gauge employee strengths and weaknesses, and use that information to help the team perform better overall.

For example, you may find that one employee is an email master, capable of drafting emails at high speeds without compromising the content of the messages.

You could then give this employee more responsibilities that cater to that strength, such as taking meeting notes and sending out recap emails to the team.

5. Flag suspicious activity.

In rare cases, you may also be able to spot suspicious activity.

For example, if one of your employees is frequently emailing with a contact from one of your competitors, it could be an indication of corporate espionage, or a sign that your employee is looking for a new job.

You may also discover your employees using their work accounts for personal exchanges which can endanger your brand.

6. Spot patterns in productivity.

Finally, you can use email monitoring to spot patterns in your employees’ email usage, which may help you develop the business or improve your performance in some way.

For example, if you notice that email traffic tends to spike around 2 pm, you could avoid hosting meetings from 2-3 pm, to give employees time to address those emails reactively.

If one day of the week seems consistently slow, you could use that day for professional development.

FAQs on Employee Monitoring Software

At this point, you may be left with some questions about how to integrate employee monitoring software, or the best way to use it on a regular basis.

These are some of the most common questions I see:

Do I have to disclose that I’m using Google Workspace or Outlook to monitor employee email?

Any kind of employee email monitoring is tricky business. As long as your employee handbook explains the function and limitations of work-related emails and company devices, your employees should have no expectation of privacy when using company technology or communication channels.

And for the most part, you aren’t legally required to disclose whether you monitor employee emails. However, telling your employees about your email monitoring plans is a good idea for many reasons.

First, you’ll build trust, and will prevent the possibility of a morale meltdown if employees find out they’ve been monitored in secret.

Second, you’ll be able to share key insights with your employees, so they can work to improve their performance.

Finally, letting employees know you’ll be monitoring their email patterns may incentivize them to work more productively or respond faster than they usually would, which could boost performance across key business metrics.

This is due to the Hawthorne effect, a psychological principle that causes people to behave differently when they know they’re being monitored.

What email monitoring insights should I be looking for?

There’s no “golden metric” for email productivity, since email effectiveness depends heavily on context; for example, sometimes a long email is overly wordy and unnecessary, but other times, it’s the best way to describe a complex problem.

That said, you can use a combination of metrics like time spent writing emails, number of emails sent, and common contacts to get a clear idea of how each of your employees is emailing on a regular basis.

How long does it take to set up?

If you use Gmail or Google Workspace, then setting up email monitoring for your own email address is literally as easy as a couple mouse clicks (if you use EmailAnalytics).

From there, setting up employee email monitoring for your employees is just a matter of making a few more mouse clicks.

If you use Outlook, then it’s similarly easy. The integration process for email monitoring is fast, and shouldn’t prevent you from accomplishing any of your other goals.

Should I be concerned about email privacy?

If you’re working with a reputable vendor, you shouldn’t have to worry about an outside party storing or reading your proprietary emails. Most providers don’t store your information, and don’t have direct access to the content of your messages; your biggest vulnerability would be data points like email response times and peak emailing periods.

Here at EmailAnalytics, we never store any of the body content of your emails, and we take data security extremely seriously. You can read more about EmailAnalytics’s privacy policy here.

Whether you want to monitor employee emails in Gmail or Google Workspace or stick to monitoring employee email in Outlook, there are options.

Putting them in place early, and using them to gauge your employees’ productivity will help you improve your team’s performance—and potentially spot small problems before they become big ones.

If you’re interested in giving EmailAnalytics a trial run, sign up for a free, 14-day trial, and improve how you manage your team.

Does an employer have the right to monitor employee email?

Yes, employers have this right as long as the monitored email address is provided by the employer. Only two states (Connecticut and Delaware) require employers to notify employees that their email is being monitored.

Can my employer see my Gmail emails?

Your employer cannot read your Gmail emails unless they have the login access to your Gmail account. However, it's inadvisable to use your personal Gmail while at work, or from a work computer, or while connected to the Internet via a work connection, as doing so could be monitored by your employer.

Can my boss read my emails without permission?

Yes, your boss has the right to read your emails as long as they were sent or received on an email account provided by your employer. The ability to do so, however, requires logging in to your account directly. As such, they would need to know your account username and password.