Is it acceptable for the secretary to have full access to our entire Outlook agenda?

Question

Today we were asked by the management of our department to give full access of our agenda in Outlook to the secretary. By full access, I mean the possibility to look, read, write, delete (own) slots in the agenda. It was mentioned that it's imperative not to alter any settings so the entire agenda will be visible to them.

The rationale is that sometimes people come in the department looking for us and by giving full access of our agenda, the secretary can advise these people on when/how to contact us.

On a personal note, I have never experienced something like that. People who want to find me can call me or send me email. I do not see why I should give access to my Outlook agenda, where I also store personal events.

So my natural question is: Is this normal/acceptable? How can I politely say that this, in my opinion, is an unacceptable practice possibly violating privacy?

My department is located in the Netherlands for what it's worth. No prior communication of this problem has been done/discussed.

Answer 1

My own perspective on this from the UK is that it is completely normal outside universities that outlook calendars are made fully accessible by anyone in the org. Many of my non-academic friends continually express surprise that I am allowed to keep my calendar private (I just share busy/free information). Even within universities, all of my professional service colleagues are expected to make their schedules accessible. On the other hand, this would seem to be a place where in general academics tend to be privileged, and I've not heard of faculty colleagues who have been forced to make their calendar public.

Answer 2

This is unreasonable. The scheduling part is reasonable, but there is no good reason I can think of to let a secretary that doesn't answer to you know who you are meeting with or exactly what you are doing every minute of the day. This seems HIGHLY invasive. I would simply make your free/busy times available without making a stink about it, and delegating the secretary appointment-making abilities.

Of course, if your chair wants to make a departmental secretary available to you to manage your calendar, this has value and you might want to consider it.

Also, you are entitled to manage your own time. If you would like to be rigid about your availability and office hours, as people who are very serious about their time management seem to be, your secretary should not be able to override it.

Answer 3

I would probably object to it. However:

Someone has a problem that they need solved and came up with a "solution" that they didn't think through very deeply. While the solution may be objectionable, the problem remains. Perhaps you or yourself and a few others can explore the issue and come up with a better solution that doesn't interfere with your own work flows and privacy.

At a very minimum, if there is no solution but to grant access, the people given access should have very clear, written, rules about what can be modified or even revealed about your documents.

But, in today's world, there are probably solutions that you can devise that meet everyone's needs. See if you can help find them.

I think this is a case of simple carelessness.

Answer 4

So my natural question is: Is this normal/acceptable?

This is quite normal. Especially those in management positions (and to a lesser extent, people in faculty positions are also frequently involved in management tasks) often have the secretariat managing their calendars. For example, when picking a date for a meeting, the secretariat should be able to see when the participants are available. The secretariat may also need to be able to view details of other appointments, for instance to determine if the location is not too far away from a different meeting they want to plan on your behalf, or to decide whether some less important meeting can be rescheduled to accommodate something more important.

I do not see why I should give access of my Outlook agenta, where I also store personal events.

This is not a very strong argument. You could simply store your personal appointments somewhere else (i.e., in your personal, not work calendar). If you object on this basis, your employer would probably tell you to do exactly that.

How can I politely say that this, in my opinion, is unacceptable practice possibly violating privacy?

It is a violation of your privacy, but only a very slight one. The university has a legitimate interest in making your calendar accessible to the secretariat. Legally, this would probably outweigh any privacy concerns.

Answer 5

Outlook has various levels of privilege that you can give to other users.

Give the secretary "Editor" privileges, and mark all of your private appointments with the "private" flag.

The secretary can then see when you are available, and can add or remove appointments for you but not modify or delete appointments that you have made. By setting the private flag on your private appointments, the secretary can only see that you have an appointment but not what it is about.

That setup will allow you to (mostly) comply with the requirements while maintaining as much of your privacy as possible.

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As others have said, Outlook and the Exchange server behind it belong to your employer. Any data on their system must be assumed to be visible to your employer. As such, if you really want to keep your private appointments private then you shouldn't have them on your employer's system.

Requesting access to your calendar is reasonable. You are there to work for the company (university,) so your supervisors and higher ups have an interest in knowing when you are there and potentially available to be talked to.

Since most people are clueless about the access rights you can set in Outlook, you ended up with a request (command?) to give the secretary full access to your calendar when less would have done.

You might want to ask if the use of limited rights was even considered - maybe whoever wrote the directive knows nothing about the limited rights. Or, knows but thinks it is too difficult to explain to all of the users in your department.

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It may also be that the Dutch translation for the various rights is as stupid as the German translation in earlier versions of Outlook. They were named something useless like "Level 1," "Level 2," etc. I've just checked, and current Outlook (Office 365) has finally gotten decent translations.

Answer 6

Before you discuss this, please be aware that there are administrative settings available that can override any setting you set, and these settings can be set by Exchange Server administrators without you noticing at all. If they just went into their Exchange Server configuration and added the secretary to the "Full Access" list of your mailbox (which includes your calendar), there would be no discussion and you couldn't even see that this access was granted.

By law, in most of the U.S., the "personal" business calendar of an employee is owned completely by the organization, not the employee, so the employee cannot expect privacy. A U.S. organization would not breach any law if they granted someone else access to your whole mailbox.

In most of Europe, on the other hand, the employee can expect some privacy in his "personal" business calendar, and any other provision has to be written down and discussed with the employee in advance. Adding someone to the "Full Access" list would breach several privacy laws at once. If a European organization wants to give someone "Full Access" to other people's calendars, they have to get written consent from the affected employees, which is easier if a valid reason is given. European organizations, if they grant "Full Access" extensively, usually have already amended their work contract templates.

Be assured that, in both cases, the use of such access to modify entries is visible to the affected employee. In case someone creates an entry at 7 a.m. for a meeting at 8 a.m., but you come in at 9 as usual, and your boss asks you where you have been, you both can see in Outlook who created the calendar entry and when.

Answer 7

It is not only "acceptable," but plain common sense, unless you consider "academic privilege" is the right to continue to manage your time in the same way 100 years ago.

Suppose someone has set up a meeting with 10 attendees, and needs to cancel it. What exactly is the purpose of all 10 people making changes, and interrupting their own work to do that, when one person (a secretary/PA) can make all the changes, most likely do the task quicker than the 10 individuals because that is the sort of work they are employed to do?

And how much time is wasted when one of the attendees "forgets" to delete the cancelled meeting, and therefore disrupts scheduling a different meeting in the same time slot, and/or turns up at the meeting room and wastes half an hour wondering why everyone else is late, and eventually trying to contact somebody to find out what is going on? (Good luck trying to contact the original meeting organizer after the meeting would have started - they probably cancelled it because they had something more important to do at that time, and they are now doing it!)

If you really think this is unacceptable, you should persuade the university to fire all non-academic support staff.

Industry figured this stuff out as soon as the tools to implement it were available. Maybe the stereotype of "people living in ivory towers" is actually an accurate description!

Answer 8

Consider that this is your employer's outlook license, paid and provided by your employer, to enable you working more effectively for him. So technically, you don't have any rights to a single bit in the content, and he can do with it what he wants.

Practically, many people feel this as intrusive, and I don't like it either. But as explained before, you can only hope for their goodwill.

Note that every appointment / meeting has a flag Private, and if you set that, the secretary will still not see anything inside it, only the invited people can see it. I use that for example for Doctor's appointments or other personal appointments that I don't want them to see.
Depending on the secratary's ethics and mindset, she can complain about that, and you have no choices (other than quitting), or she understands and will never say a word, especially when you use it sparingly or for appointments that are ouside of work times.

Answer 9

No it's not normal. Context: Netherlands, with some academia experience but mostly in industry, albeit in IT and software development in places where no-one wears a tie.

It is normal to share one's calendar to the extent that your co-workers know when you are available. I usually share the details also, and put down private events as private. This is because i want people to be able to see what meetings i may have so that it is easier to plan. For example if i'm unavailable at a certain date because of a meeting they know can or will be rescheduled, they could still ask me to meet them at that time-slot.

Demanding you grant secretaries access rights to reschedule your agenda is stupid because it will eventually lead to the calendar not showing the actual events. If your dentist appointment is removed, you will still go to the dentist and people at work will not know that you are not at work.

Now if you had your own secretary, who you instruct to schedule appointments on your behalf, that would be different.

It is entirely possible that management is clueless about outlook access rights, and/or not very competent. Maybe just informing them that secretaries and others should only have read-access to a persons calendar would suffice to change these new rules.

Answer 10

This is more of a "how to use Outlook" question (do we have an Office SE?) Or a workplace relations question. Not an Academia question.

It is really fine. Several answers say no, but they are in the "not used to it" category.

This is your workplace email--they can do what they want with it. Also, it is very reasonable to give full access to a personal admin (dedicated secretary). Dept secretary not that different.

Note:

1. You can still make individual extremely private appointments (proctologist, affair-mate) completely private at the APPOINTMENT level (you click a box). Leave your routine work stuff (committees, students, etc. open to the secretary. She needs that when juggling meetings. Might even get some help from her.

2. You can keep your email confidential. (When I had a dedicated assistant, I gave full permission for that, though. Just have to use a personal email for personal traffic.)

Answer 11

You got in other answers all the reasons why your calendar should be open.

I keep my calendar private with free/busy information available, mostly for two reasons:

• I have confidential information. Simply the name of the meeting ("disciplinary meeting with Mr X - slacking off at work") or a list of participants may be problematic. Depending on your role this may apply or not.

• I am allowed by law (in France, I guess Netherlands may be close to that too) to have private items in my calendar. Nobody is allowed to have access to these items beside me. This can be solved, however, with the "Private" flag on an Outlook meeting (and restricting access to these meetings)