Dear Bob ... I have a problem and I thought you might be able to point me in the right direction. I am the e-mail administrator for a small company and we recently had an employee pass away suddenly. Are there any best practices regarding how to handle his e-mail account and phone/voicemail? Do we immediatly delete the account? Leave it active but hidden? Auto-generate a reply indicating that the person has pass Dear Bob …I have a problem and I thought you might be able to point me in the right direction. I am the e-mail administrator for a small company and we recently had an employee pass away suddenly. Are there any best practices regarding how to handle his e-mail account and phone/voicemail? Do we immediatly delete the account? Leave it active but hidden? Auto-generate a reply indicating that the person has passed away?I’ve not had to deal with this before. A quick search on Google did not turn up anything useful. – SaddenedDear Saddened …Ugh. Tough situation. I don’t know of any official best practices, so I checked in with my partner, Steve Nazian, who has dealt with this kind of situation. Here’s our best advice. First and foremost, don’t delete either account. There could be critical company business left uncovered. This goes beyond preserving the message stores, as new messages can come in addressed to the deceased employee.You have two calls to make. The first, if you haven’t already done so, is to contact HR and get official guidance regarding what you are and aren’t allowed to say. There might actually be a policy in place, at which point you’re pretty much off the hook. There are some issues best done by the numbers, if there are any.Second, confer with the employee’s manager. Find out who, if it isn’t the manager, will be taking over the deceased employee’s responsibilities, and offer two alternatives. The first is to simply forward e-mails and telephone calls. The manager (or manager and employee) can agree to the script. And there should be a script – this shouldn’t be left to improvisation. For telephone calls it might be:“Hello, this is Joe Schwartz.”“Oh – I was calling for Fred Glotz.” “We have a sad circumstance here. Fred passed away last week. I’m handling his responsibilities for the time being – how can I help you?”Another alternative is an intercept message. Don’t mention “Fred’s” death in it – it would be in poor taste. For telephone calls it might be, “Fred Glotz’s telephone calls are being taken by Joe Schwartz. Please hold while I connect you.” For e-mail, program an autoreply message to say, “Your message has been forwarded to Joe Schwartz, who is taking care of correspondence addressed to Fred Glotz.”Whoever receives the deceased employee’s e-mail handles any business messages and forwards personal e-mails to the employee’s spouse. Give the employee’s manager access to the voicemail box. It might make sense to leave the voice mail account alone for a few days with the employee’s manager monitoring, then change over to a voice greeting to the effect that calls were being handled by so and so (no reason given) — please call extension whatever or press “1” to get connected.And please accept our sympathies. Especially in a small company, dealing with the death of a co-worker is very, very difficult.– Bob ——– Technology Industry