If your company uses a free or standard plan (you can see which plan your employer uses by clicking the drop-down menu under the name of your company), the administrator needs to request a one-time export from Slack. Here’s how it works for the most common workplace communications suites. In fact, we found that the process of getting at those messages was more convoluted than we expected. Theoretically an administrator or manager can access messages in an employer-run messaging platform, but the process of doing so depends on the type of plan your employer has, and even then some random manager can’t just search for their name to find out if people are making jokes about them. “Your manager, in the vast majority of situations, does not have access to that communication unless they go through IT or HR, and unless they have a good reason,” he said. “Either through IT or HR or someplace, anything you put on those platforms, your employer can look at.” For the most part, Kropp said, it’s impractical for an employer to read all of your messages fishing for gossip or smack talk, though, and not just anyone can go browsing through the data. “Anything that you write on any company messaging platform, your employer has access to,” he said. Brian Kropp, chief of research for Gartner’s HR practice, put this bluntly. Let’s get this out of the way: Employers can surveil your conversations in any company-run software. Employers can see everything you write in email as well as in Slack, Google Workplace, and Microsoft Teams To what purpose depends on the type of work you do-and whom you do it for. And privacy concerns aren’t the only worry, as employers are also starting to use the data extracted from these tools to gauge productivity. But depending on the software your company uses and the type of work you do, some of your activity could be exposed. But as companies expand their use of remote-work software, there are increasing concerns about what kinds of data bosses can access through such tools.

In the past, we’ve covered the dos and don’ts of using your work computer for personal business (in short: don’t).

With manager not working