My dad used to have a little sports car, an Austin Healy. I cannot remember every detail about that car but I do remember a little label he had right above the ignition key: “Engage Brain Before Engaging Engine”

A similar reminder would be useful above every computer screen or on every smart phone: “Rethink Before Hitting Reply.”

Many of your employees have grown up with the free flow of information courtesy of that box on their desk or the smaller box in their hand. Even as they decry the government violating their privacy, they send all sorts of personal things into the cyberworld that can never, ever be taken back. It’s one thing if they are students in high school or at university; the person who gets hurt the most by their mistakes is them. But once they work for you, you are also liable to take a hit.

Email is the easiest way to screw up…hitting Reply All instead of Reply is a good way to send a bad message about someone directly to that someone. In many knowledge industries you are likely to be doing a lot of group work, and so people may grow accustomed to using Reply All for online discussions within the team. That habit may extend to non-team emails, and that is when trouble is likely to occur. A good rule of thumb for your office is to use Reply All as the exception rather than the rule. (Microsoft, bless their hearts, will help save you from yourself if you use Outlook).

For that matter, it might be useful to keep group projects out of the email realm and use in-house capabilities, like a wiki or Sharepoint or a cloud-based system, to conduct your internal business. Emails have a way of leaking out, sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally, and that is a good way to see your internal information go out to the wrong people…like, say, your competitors. More on that in a moment.

A last point about emails: the content. If you spend any time at all following the news you know that people often put things into email they think no one else will ever see. Bad idea. You have to assume that any email you send will be seen by the world. Let’s face it, once sent they never, ever go away. Lots of people have grown up operating in an electronic medium, sharing their deepest thoughts, starting and ending relationships, and generally doing many things by text message and email instead of doing them face to face. The problem is that, after a while, people might forget the specifics of a real-life discussion, but electrons never die. A suggestion for your employees: if you would not want your mother to read it, do not put it in an email or a text.

As for sending stuff outside your company…collaborative employees like to share ideas and get others’ opinions, and given that people move more often between jobs these days, the people whose ideas they are soliciting might not be in the same firm as them. That might not stop them (and it’s not a bad thing to get outside opinions), but you have got to make sure they know how to be careful. Your employees may be sending out proprietary information that could end up hurting your company. Do not leave it up to their judgment, because everyone’s judgment was formed in different ways, and they may not be thinking about the same risks as you. You need to design a policy about what can be sent outside the company and what cannot, and make sure your employees understand that.

We need our electronic communication…20 years ago, we apparently did not know what we were missing, but now we do. But every good thing has a potential downside, and our electronic tools are no exception. Do not just assume your employees know the right way and the wrong way to share information. Take a moment and give them your thoughts on the matter so everyone can handle it the same way — safely.