Infamous Inflatables: Response to Employee Demands for Pay After Violating Cyber-Surveillance Policy

You work for a company called “Infamous Inflatables”, which designs and builds the huge balloon replicas used for advertising movie premieres, retails store openings, sporting and special events. Since you started, you’ve seen balloon re-creations of everything from a 17-metre tall King Kong to a small 3- meter wide pizza.

Not long ago, company management installed the ‘cyber-surveillance’ software Silent Watch to track and record employees’ computer usage at work. At the time, you sent out a memo informing all employees that they should limit their personal computer use and email to work projects only – after all, the company is paying them to do a job, and not for social media scrolling. You also informed them that their work would be monitored and that Silent Watch would record every keystroke of their work. As it turned out, Silent Watch caught six of the creative-design staff spending between 50 – 75% of their working hours surfing internet sites unrelated to their jobs. The company withheld their pay without warning and Management sent them a memo notifying them they were not fired but were on probation. You agreed with this, because when they work, both employees are very talented at what they do and good employees with artistic talent are hard to find.

Yesterday, Denzel Washington, one of the people who were put on probation, sent you a letter demanding his pay and claiming he was spied on illegally. On the contrary, company lawyers have assured management that the courts almost always side with employers on this issue, particularly after they receive a written warning – such as the one you wrote previously. The computer the employees in question misused, belong to the company (Infamous Inflatables) and employees are paid a fair salary for their work.

Your Task:

Write a formal reply to Mr. Washington and send copies to the President, Vice President, and company lawyer (multiple audience members), explaining he will not be receiving his pay and that the company was well within its rights to put him on probation. But be careful of your tone – use the negative news strategy and communicate in a positive, professional tone.

• Use the four-part pattern/strategy for negative news, as communicated in the textbook and lecture.
• Use full and correct email format including coherent paragraphing, reader access techniques (lists, headings, white space) and write it using the indirect approach including a b