No documented obligation
Establish it first. Supervision without a stated regulatory basis is difficult to defend to employees or to a regulator.
Microsoft Purview · Readiness
Communication supervision readiness
Twenty checks before turning on supervision, covering scope, privacy and whether the review queue is workable.
Why run this
What this checklist is for
Communication supervision is a legitimate regulatory control and an employee relations risk in equal measure. Scoped badly it produces an unmanageable queue and a workforce that feels surveilled.
The design decisions below are compliance and legal decisions before they are technical ones. Getting the order wrong is the common failure.
Run it with
Head of Compliance
And with
Legal and privacy counsel
And with
IT administrators and the intended reviewers
0 of 0 complete · 0%
The checklist
20 checks, in the order we would run them
Tick only what you can genuinely evidence today. An item you intend to do is not an item you have done, and scoring yourself generously here only produces a comfortable number and an uncomfortable project.
Section 1
Mandate and scope
Why you are doing this and to whom.
Section 2
Policy design
Whether the configuration will produce useful signal.
Section 3
Reviewers and access
The most sensitive access in your tenant.
Section 4
Evidence and operation
Whether it will demonstrably have operated.
What your score means
Read this against the number above
These bands are deliberately blunt. The middle band is where most organizations honestly sit, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to proceed from — provided the gaps are written down with owners rather than carried as optimism.
0–59%Significant gaps
Do not proceed yet. More than four in ten items are unaddressed, and the ones that fail here are usually the foundational ones that make everything after them harder.
60–84%Mostly ready, with known gaps
Proceed on a defined scope, with the outstanding items written into the plan as risks with owners and dates. This is the most common honest position.
85–100%Ready
The remaining gaps are small enough to handle during delivery rather than before it. Confirm the unticked items are genuinely minor rather than simply unexamined.
Your score highlights automatically as you tick items above. Nothing is saved, sent or tracked — refreshing the page clears it.
Closing the gaps
If you could not tick these, start here
The four items below are the ones whose absence causes the most trouble downstream. If your unticked items include any of these, they are worth addressing before the rest.
Privacy consultation not completed
Do this before configuration. Retrofitting consultation after supervision has started is materially worse than doing it first.
Sampling rate untested
Pilot in a limited scope and measure the queue. An unworkable queue is the most common cause of a supervision programme quietly lapsing.
No reviewer training
Train before enabling. Untrained reviewers produce inconsistent decisions, which is worse evidence than no supervision.
Want a second opinion on your score?
We will review one control process end to end and show you what supervision scoped to your actual obligation would look like, including the expected queue volume.
Talk through your result Read the related guides We reply to every message within one business day.
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