Have you thought about what you’d do if one of your employees started tweeting about what a terrible boss you are? Or wrote Facebook status updates about your stupid business problems?
And what about the positive side? That sales person who built up a fabulous list of contacts on LinkedIn? Who owns those contacts? What about the marketing manager who tweets positive things about the company at your request? Who owns that Twitter handle?
To help figure out what to do click here: Social Media for Small Biz: Your HR Survival Guide Source
There’s been a big debate going on in the UK about the use of social media policies following the CIPD conference – equivalent of your SHRM conference. The argument put forth by Neil Morrison, group HR director of Random House, is that policies ‘can rip the soul out of the organisation’.
Neil states: “Why do you have so much of your HR infrastructure set up to kick into play when something goes wrong?” The posting talks about whether HR trusts its employees so I’d like to throw out the same curve ball to an American HR population.
If you have a social media policy that is so rigid, does this create a fear culture around social media and a policing culture? Matthew Hanwell, HR director for Nokia, publicly asks its employee workforce to be honest and open about their frustrations and they can criticise the company or management without fear of reprisal. If you create an open, honest, transparent culture where people get to state their real views, how they feel, isn’t this about allowing people to foster change rather than shutting people down through scaremongering social media policies littered with employment law and red tape?
This seems to be a hot topic across both the US and UK:
http://change-effect.com/2011/11/14/its-all-about-trust/
Thanks for the thoughts and the article.
I’m all about trust, but the problem is, not all people are trustworthy and you can’t fire them for posting bad things on Facebook if you don’t have a policy to do that.
Of course, I’m not familiar with UK employment law, so it may be completely different.