Bullying bosses make email hell

Bullying via email is rife in the workplace and is forcing tormented employees to quit, according to a Novell survey.

More than half the respondents admitted they had been victims of so-called flame mails, mainly from their bosses.

Conducted by research company Ronin, the survey questioned more than 1,000 men and women across a range of companies in the UK and Ireland. The survey was commissioned by Novell, which provides email access to about eight million people with its Groupwise package.

The study found that men were five times more likely than women to use the internet as a means of harassment and over half of the men questioned confessed to having sent flame mails. As with other studies of bullying in the workplace, it was discovered that senior staff were usually most guilty, often sending aggressive messages under the guise of ?constructive management?.

Email was found to be the second most used form of communication within offices after the telephone, with 94 per cent admitting they wasted up to an hour on it each day. The estimated cost to British business of wastage due to email is #10 billion a year.

Jacqui Forrest, sales and market development manager at Novell, said it was the company?s duty to quantify the dangers of its products and urged other IT firms to do the same. ?It?s a bigger problem than we anticipated,? she said. ?We want business managers to see and react.?