I have better things to do than spy on people's social media use or web browsing, so even when I'm explicitly directed to do so, I don't look any harder than I have to in order to comply with my orders.

Take it from an IT guy - you're not that interesting, and I resent requests to 'look into' other employees' activities. In addition to that, the other consideration is that it costs a lot of money to actually store everyone's web traffic, so the content of messages and web requests is generally not stored for any significant period of time - it costs a lot of money to store that information and make it searchable, and there's rarely any business reason to do so. While it's certainly possible, the more applicable question is 'how likely is it that my IT department cares?' (Unless you're doing something that could get you fired or arrested, naturally.) There could be employee monitoring software that records chat logs. EDIT: After seeing Andrey's answer, he brings up a good point, this is more plausible than I though. Honestly I'm just putting this one in for completeness. You can clear your cache your IT Department might still have a backup but most places don't backup desktops, only servers.

I'm not sure what Chrome caches for hangouts, but an educated guess would be that it's profile pictures of your contacts and other images but not the text of your conversations. So rather than downloading the same image from Google a hundred times it downloads it onto your computes hard drive once, then uses that each time. This is a more plausible issue but still incredibly unlikely, Chrome (all browsers) cache things. Chances are even if they were doing this they would not have recorded the data, just that you connected to Google.

As BigBob1000 says it's encrypted (HTTPS) however many enterprises install trusted certificates on their computers and then basically Man-in-the-Middle their own computers to decrypt all HTTPS traffic. When syncing your hangout data if your IT Department monitors traffic over the network they could have seen it. There are three places that the IT Department could see it: In Transit However don't freak out yet, unless they are looking for it, it's extremely unlikely that they will see it. Yes if your Google Hangouts data has synced onto your work computer the IT department could view it.

Download chat logs hangouts google