The Secrets In Your Inbox

Employee emails contain valuable insights into company morale—and might even serve as an early-warning system for uncovering malfeasance. Bosses are taking an interest.

- Frank Partnoy

When Andrew Fastow, the former chief financial officer of Enron, finishes a public-speaking gig these days, a dozen or so people from the audience are typically waiting to talk to him. Some ask about his role in the scandal that brought down the energy company. Others want to know about his six years in prison. After a 2016 event in Amsterdam, as the crowd was thinning out, Fastow spotted two men standing in a corner. Once everyone else had left, they walked up to him and handed him a laminated chart.

The men were there on behalf of Keen- Corp, a data-analytics firm. Companies hire KeenCorp to analyze their employees’ emails. KeenCorp doesn’t read the emails, exactly—its software focuses on word patterns and their context. The software then assigns the body of messages a numerical index that purports to measure the level of employee “engagement.” When workers are feeling positive and engaged, the number is high; when they are disengaged or expressing negative emotions like tension, the number is low.

The two men in Amsterdam told Fastow that they had tested the software using several years’ worth of emails sent by Enron’s top 150 executives, which had become publicly available after the company’s demise. They were checking to see how key moments in the company’s tumultuous collapse would register on the KeenCorp index. But something appeared to have gone wrong.