Being that I work in Human Resources and have dabbled in the social media marketing department a bit, I believe that I am best equipped to answer these questions from experience and see how that pans out with our group. With my experience in policy and handbook writing, developing social media policy should not be a gigantic hurdle for me.
My opinion on how employers should handle situations where employees are expressing negative opinions of the company via social media, would really bounce back to the policy that the employer put in place initially. Employers should be sure to cover social media usage in their handbooks and have a clear policy on how employees are expected to conduct themselves. While employers may not be able to prohibit negative comments, verbiage such as "The Company encourages use of social media, however while free to express your opinion, we strongly discourage any commentary that may risk the reputation of The Company. We expect that if you have any questions or concerns about The Company, you will report to management immediately, so that we can investigate and take the proper steps to rectify your concerns." Should an employee express negativity online, I think the best strategy would be to counsel the employee on their comments and find out why they feel the way they do.I would create a social media policy that is in accordance with the National Labor Relations Board's recommendations.
Monster.com outlines the NLRB's recommendations (2014):
- Avoid general, blanket prohibitions on any employee actions with respect to social media. This includes banning employees from talking about their job, complaining about their boss or co-workers or disparaging company policies, among others.
- Instead of generally banning employees from revealing confidential company information or trade secrets, be specific about what employees may not reveal. While it may be okay to protect trade secrets, formulas, customer lists and technological data, the NLRB has found that employees may have the right to discuss certain aspects of their confidential employment situation (such as salaries or bonuses) via social media.
- Give employees specific examples of inappropriate postings. Acceptable limits include prohibitions on bullying, discrimination and retaliation. Talk to a lawyer before disciplining an employee for defaming or otherwise lying about the company via social media.
- Do not restrict employees’ ability to “friend” co-workers on their personal social media pages.
- Unless you have a legitimate and defensible business purpose as part of your social media guidelines, do not ask employees (or worse, applicants) for their social media account information or passwords.
- Be consistent in how and when you review the social media accounts for prospective employees.
New NLRB Guidelines for Social Media in the Workplace. (2014, January 1). Retrieved October 11, 2014, from http://hiring.monster.com/hr/hr-best-practices/small-business/news/nlrb.aspx
Great job on this response, you make a lot of good points and have a very solid policy. You mention that the policy should involve the expectation that the employee should come to management with concerns. I don't know what the answer to this is, but I wonder if employees to choose to express negative opinions on social media because they fear backlash from bringing up issues to management. It seems that creating a social media policy that discourages using those mediums to express negative thoughts has to be accompanied by a workplace culture and policy that allows employees to freely discuss problems and management to make legitimate efforts to understand and address those problems without repercussions for the employees.
ReplyDeleteI agree Greg. My feeling is that if the employee is willing to freely express their feelings on social media, where they are well aware of the fact that this can be shared and sent to their employer, they should feel comfortable enough to discuss it privately as well. I think sometimes people have a problem with discussing things face to face and find it easier to express their feelings behind a keyboard. This is where these things may become problematic, however, that is a different topic.
ReplyDeleteNice post Jackie.It would seem difficult to create a a justifiable clause based on expectation alone. The difficultly of managing employee response and reaction impedes on the basis of freedom of expression. One of the interesting things I have learned to understand about social media is it often fringes of "freedom of speech". How do you control the expression of negative opinions, and preserve basic constitutional rights?!Not an easy task to accomplish. I found your policy to be well organized and practical. I would suggest implementing some sort of employee support program to influence effective communication between employees and management.
ReplyDeleteHi Jackie,
ReplyDeleteGreat job on this post. I think the guidelines you shared from Monster are great, and providing employees with specific examples about what they should not do (without deviating from NLRB guidelines) is critical. I agree that employers should counsel employees who have spoken negatively about the organization online, and should try to find out the reasons for their dissatisfaction. This promotes effective communication across ranks within an organization and, in turn, can strengthen employee morale and help the company operate more effectively.
Thank you everyone. This was a very interesting topic for me because it falls into the scope of what I do on a daily basis. I recently had a court hearing regarding a conflict of interest regarding application development and everything falls back on the handbook and the policies that were put in place. The policies should be specific in certain areas but other areas can cover a great deal of issues, ones you may not even expect to happen.
ReplyDelete