Routine Persuasive Message Guidelines

Summary Because everyone at your company is suddenly workingfrom home due to the pandemic, upper management wants to make itmandatory for all employees to install insecure corporate spywareon any device they use for work. As the lead developer on yourteam, you must speak up for yourself and your colleagues andpersuade your direct manager that this is a bad idea. Using thestrategies discussed in your readings and resources, write a wellformatted email to your manager, Deion Guillory (he/him). Include asubject line and email signature. Do not copy text or phrases fromthese guidelines, the readings, templates, or any other source.

Details For this assignment, imagine that you are a seniorsoftware developer at the imaginary company, Swift CodingEnterprises. The company has been fortunate during the pandemic:the software you make is still in high demand, and your jobs aresuch that all employees can do their work from home. Some of youare using company laptops, but most of you have your own desktopcomputers, laptops, tablets, etc. that you also use for work whileyou’re at home. However, your upper management (CEO, CFO, etc.) areconcerned that employees are “slacking off” because they’re workingfrom home. They want to monitor employees’ work to make sure no oneis taking advantage of the situation to be less productive. Inorder to do this, they’ve instructed all managers to make itmandatory for employees to download and install Beramind corporatemonitoring software on any device the employee uses for work.Beramind takes screenshots of the user’s display every 30 secondsand sends it to cloud storage. Anyone who has the company’s adminlogin can view these screenshots and which employee’s computer theycome from. They can also choose, without notifying the user, tomirror a user’s display on their own system and watch what thatuser is doing in real time. Your manager, Deion Guillory (he/him),has received these instructions from his own manager. He has sent amemo to you and your team telling you to download and installBeramind on your computers. You and your team have discussed thesituation privately, and you don’t want to install Beramind formany reasons, such as:

- Your team’s output (e.g. code, documentation) has been thesame as when you worked in the office. - Some of you haven’t beenable to work as many hours as usual, but it’s not because you’reslacking off—it’s because there’s a pandemic, and you have otheremergency responsibilities, such as taking care of children. - Youdon’t want your bosses to be able to monitor your activity on yourpersonal and/or family computers, even if you do use it for worksometimes. - Beramind uses a lot of bandwidth, system memory, andprocessor power, which not everyone is able to spare. - Accordingto some articles you read online, Beramind doesn’t use end-to-endencryption when it sends data to its server.

Because you’re the team lead, it’s up to you to email Deion andexplain your team’s situation. You want to make it clear that noneof you will install this program, and you want to persuade Deionthat it’s a bad enough idea that he should push back against it tohis own bosses. TIP: You may make up any reasonable information youneed (for example, a colleague’s name or exactly how much systemmemory Beramind needs) as long as it doesn’t contradict theassignment guidelines. By “reasonable,” your instructor means thatthe information you include might happen in reality and doesn’tsubstantially change the assignment. For example, it would not be“reasonable” to tell Deion that your team can’t install Beramindbecause you have all forgotten the passwords to your system adminprofiles and can’t install anything.

Your email should follow the best practices for business emailsthat you’ve learned about in your readings/resources. You mustinclude an email signature block and a subject line. There is norequired word count, but you must include enough information toachieve your purpose effectively without overloading a single emailwith too much content. Most submissions will be between 200 and 500words, although it is possible to write an excellent but slightlylonger or shorter submission.