I can hear the cries of ‘hypocrisy’ as I type and post this to LinkedIn sat at my desk in my workplace during core working hours.
‘Typical employer. Happy for me to use social media to market your business but critical when I want to organise a catch up with my mates at the weekend or to skip through potential hot dates on Tinder’.
No, not so. That is definitely not what this article is about. I have no problem with the use of social media use in the workplace just as long as it is used with care and only for a reasonable amount of time. My concern with social media use in relation to the workplace is that often it is not used with such care and the results can be damaging.
The use of social media in the workplace continues to pose significant challenges for modern employers. As valuable as it can be as a marketing tool for business, the misuse of social media by workers can create difficult challenges to business owners, presenting the type of risks that HR advisors of the last decade could only have dreamt of (albeit in their worst nightmares!) In the article below I have looked at the most common of these concerns that arise.
Reputational damage to the business
Damage to an employer’s business is probably the greatest concern that arises from the misuse of social media. Other issues can often be contained. Reputational damage can be a brand killer.
It is easy for an employee to post something recklessly to a social media platform regarding their employer which is damaging to their brand and which will live on indefinitely in cyberspace. Humorous postings regardless of their accuracy often go viral resulting in a global audience. A few years ago, I assisted a global company to take down a blog site on which current and ex-employees were posting libellous comments on that company’s products and working practices. With the increased use of social media and the speed at which such information can be shared, I shudder to think of the damage that could have been done by such postings to a global social media platform.
To try and limit the exposure for reckless posts, employers should always require that employees do not use their employer’s name, branding or logo’s in any postings that they make. This should assist to avoid personal postings are being misinterpreted as brand related.
It is particularly important that employees have regard to this requirement in respect of any photographs or videos that the post. I have dealt with a matter where an employee posted images involving nudity and explicit language as a joke but had failed to consider the employer’s name and signage in one of the images. This proved embarrassing for the employer and ultimately cost the employee the job.
Employees also need to be exceptionally careful when posting their personal use on sensitive issues to their social media pages. As was recently seen in the Brexit campaign in the UK, strong views on political issues can all too soon stray into unacceptable territory and behaviour. This can present problems for a business if the personal comments are associated with the employer. It can also be problematic if it escalates to a clash of opinion between colleagues, which leads nicely onto the next issue.
Disputes between colleagues
This continues to be a real problem in Australian workplaces. When typing social media posts, individuals are often far more reckless than they ever would be in conversation with a colleague or when sending an email. Things that individuals wouldn’t dream of saying face-to-face are often posted on Facebook or Twitter accounts. Keyboards and access to a site on which to share an opinion, often appears to generate the same form of foolishness and feeling of unaccountability that being behind the wheel of a car instils shortly before a road rage incident.
Postings that cause offence to a colleague can result in big problems for both the employee and the employer. Where employees use social media to criticise, abuse or harass colleagues, then their employers can also potentially be held liable for this behaviour.
Where I have often seen this go wrong is not necessarily in the original posting made by an employee, but instead with how that employee subsequently engages with the comments made by others to their posting. I assume that everyone is now familiar with Godwin’s law? It often flows like that.
I have witnessed on a number of occasions employees making discriminatory comments regarding someone’s race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability, not as the initial posting that they made, but rather after other comments to that effect have been made. Such comments are made without consideration of who is in their network and who may be offended by his comments.
I have also dealt with disputes arising between colleagues over the most trivial of matters. Bullying can arise easily through ill-informed postings regarding colleagues. You will be surprised at the number of times I have heard it said (not just in the social media context), that ‘what I do outside of work is my own business’. This is, of course, untrue when it negatively impacts upon those with whom you and your employer’s business.
Overuse of social media when at work
It is widely thought that the consumption of alcohol increased as a direct result of prohibition in the USA. Commentators when speculating as to the reasons why often suggest an absolute ban on alcohol made more glamorous and this, together with the difficulty of enforcing the ban, had a negative impact on the success of the Eighteenth Amendment. In a world of smartphones, tablet computers and easy access to the internet, it would be naive to believe an absolute ban on the use of social media during the working day would be necessary or enforceable. People take breaks and social media is always only a few clicks away.
The important question for employers is deciding how much use is acceptable and then managing such use. The loss of productivity through social media use is now probably of more concern than having to prevent employees from visiting of ‘inappropriate’ websites when at work. After 20 years of the internet, most employees now understand the workplace implications of visiting such sites. I miss the workplace investigations and the sheer embarrassment that such issues caused. People have now grown up with access to the internet and understand what is acceptable.
The current issue is the distraction that social media use can provide to workplace productivity and how this is managed. A number of clients for which I have acted, now permit employees to use their workplace computers over lunch breaks for personal use, including social media, as a means of limiting the use of social media during the day without driving it underground (smartphones in the toilets, excessive coffee breaks). I understand from them that this has been reasonably successful.
This also enables the use and the postings to be more easily monitored, subject to a carefully drafted Internet/social media policy and employees are being alerted to the same in advance. By doing this, a line can be drawn as to how much time is appropriate.
Overall
Whether you like it or loathe it, social media is here to stay. Accordingly, is important that businesses manage the use of social media by the employees to minimise the risk that its misuse presents to their brand, to their workplace relations and productivity.