With the ever-growing use of social media and networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), more and more employees are both using and abusing them on the job. There are plenty of great, beneficial uses for these media in the work environment but you're setting up a variety of potential legal, ethical, and reputational disasters if you aren't clear about how they can and can't be used while on the job.
Here are four essentials to consider in developing policies and procedures around the use of these media:
• Be explicit about who can access these sites and why. It will help with compliance if employees know the specific rationale for your decisions in this area. Also, for which purposes can and cannot these sites be used on company time or about company business? Once you have answered these questions to your satisfaction, be sure that everyone is explicitly informed.
• Clarify that social media use is no different than other e-mail/Internet use for employees (e.g. no guarantees of confidentiality, that statements on these sites about the business or its employees can be used in legal proceedings if/as relevant - whether about the employee or the company, etc.)
• Create policies and procedures around social media that are consistent with all of your other reputation-management policies. Then, remind employees that, like all things on the Internet, once they are uploaded, social media comments are going to both be searchable and be out there for a looooooooong time. Negative comments about the company can create far-reaching reputational damage—even if unintentionally—with a potentially long-lasting impact. Even comments that are ambiguous as far as whether or not they are intended to be negative can easily create a negative impression on the web.
• Update your IT and HR policies and procedures to assure that social media are discussed explicitly. There are still plenty of employees at all levels of companies who believe that these sites somehow magically exist in a world outside of the usual e-mail/Internet realm. It needs to be made clear that the same rules apply for social media as do for all other forms of e-mail and Internet use.
Your company shouldn't run from social media. Used creatively and appropriately, they can provide a huge range of benefits from building customer relationships to product and service promotion, to recruiting, etc. Just be sure that your approach to these rapidly-evolving media keep pace so that their benefits and be maximized and their potential down sides minimized.
Christopher Bauer helps companies create and implement high-impact, high-ROI ethics and values training programs. In addition to consultation on program development and implementation, he also provides keynotes and seminars on how to reduce costly employee ethics problems. Information on Bauer Ethics Seminars is available at
