It’s wise to assume that your employer is monitoring your work email and to be careful what you send.

After all, the email system belongs to your employer, so staffers generally don’t have a right to privacy for emails sent using the company’s equipment and network. .

But a new survey finds that the number of employees who think their boss is watching is actually 20 percent higher than the number of bosses who actually are.

Simply Hired surveyed 1,000 employers and employees and found that three-fourths of employees think their work activity is being surveilled by their employers in some way. Seventy-eight percent of lower-management employees felt they were being watched, 10 percent more than those in entry-level positions.

About the same number of women – 74.4 percent – and men – 72.2 percent – believe they are under surveillance at work.

But it turns out employees are not being watched as much as they think. Just over half of employers, 52.4 percent, said they monitor employees’ work email, for example, although 72.4 percent of employees believe they’re being monitored.

Likewise, employees believe 68 percent of employers are monitoring their browsing history while in actuality the number is just 40 percent.

And maybe it’s because 78 percent of employees said that if they were the boss, they would be monitoring their employees to make sure their time was being used efficiently.

More than 47 percent of employers thought their employees were clearing their browsing history to hide their activity, while 25 percent thought employees were switching from office Wi-Fi to personal data to cover their tracks.

Employees in the marketing and advertising industry were the most likely to feel that they were being watched, followed by information services and data processing.

Tech employees were the most likely to use privacy software on their computers to stop employers from accessing their personal activity (almost 93 percent) followed by the arts, entertainment, and recreation industry (about 76 percent).

A survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) revealed that more than half of the responding companies monitor employee email, and one quarter of them had fired an employee for misusing email, per LinkedIn.

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This was originally posted by Amy Stych for bizjournals.com. Photo credit Bostonglobe.com