Social Media in the Workforce: Tweet, Tweet, Tweet, Tweedly-Deet

By Kennedy Maize

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Policies Are Slowly Evolving

Smart companies are increasingly aware of the issues that social media raise. Media technologist Chris Boudreaux is writing an online book about the subject and is collecting a useful compendium of companies’ policies on the subject. The Washington Post recently promulgated rules for its employees on how to tweet and post to social media, prompting some grumbles from its employees that the newspaper just doesn’t get how the new media work.

An early Facebook expert, Clara Shih, published a very useful book on the subject last April, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff. She’s an evangelist for the business pluses of social networking, arguing that the technologies provide “a much more personalized interaction with a very large number of people,” including employees, business partners and suppliers, and customers.

Legal Issues

But act with caution. There are myriad legal issues to consider when it comes to social media and business organizations, as a recent webcast on HR.com—sponsored by the cutting-edge employment law firm of Littler Mendelson, based in California—demonstrated. As partner Kevin O’Neill commented about social media and employment law, “The landscape is littered with land mines,” and “a perfect storm is brewing out there.”

Among the areas where social media and employment issues can collide are employee use on-the-job and off-the-job, management use of social media in recruiting and retention, use of social media in union organizing campaigns, privacy rights for employees and employers, and several others. It is, as songwriter Randy Newman has said, “a jungle out there”: Employees have been fired for blogging on the job; courts have upheld private, members-only blogs involving company employees; and the implications of Twitter are just starting to enter the consciousness of the employment world.

According to the HR.com presentation, half of employers lack a policy to address an employee’s use of social networking. A quarter have disciplined an employee for “improper activities on social networking sites,” and a majority “do not actively monitor their workers’ use of social networking websites.” Those figures come from a late September 2009 report (PDF) by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association Survey. According to the HR.com presentation, Delta, Google, Wells Fargo, and Starbucks have terminated employee-bloggers who violated employment contracts.

Many laws in many jurisdictions are relevant to employment and social media, and the law is playing catch-up, noted O’Neill. Among the relevant federal statutes, observed Littler partner Philip Gordon, are the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Railway Labor Act. According to the Littler group, 33 states have laws, mostly related to off-duty conduct, that protect employees against adverse action.

For HR professionals, company communicators, and high-level managers, this is a fertile and uncertain field. Littler’s Gordon, a subject matter expert, runs a worthwhile blog for those who want to keep current on the legal aspects.

Ad Age’s Ochman offered a positive summary of the issue: “If you don’t already have a social-media policy, you need to create one. If you don’t trust your employees to talk to customers, or to present the brand, you need to look at (1) your hiring practices, (2) your training practices.”

Littler’s O’Neill offered caution. Noting that much of social media consists of “spontaneous blurting,” he said, “The spontaneous blurt and the workplace can be a very dangerous combination.” He agrees with Ochman that companies need to create social media policies.

—Kennedy Maize is MANAGING POWER’s executive editor.