TRANSFORMING Teams By Paige McAllister
Dealing with employees’ online behavior e have all read stories of someone’s unacceptable or illegal actions going viral and the public using social media to identify that person and where they work and live. Employee behavior on social media can also have a significant negative impact on your business’s reputation and livelihood. Since this use of social media represents the company directly, you must take extra precautions when allowing someone to post on behalf of the company. Specifically: ● Make sure that only authorized employees are allowed to post on behalf of the company and have control of the company’s social media accounts. Require employees to provide current user names and passwords to management and IT for monitoring. Train these employees on proper communication skills and how to maximize the impact on the platforms. Ensure that they are regularly trained on non-discrimination and are up-to-date on acceptable and unacceptable language and imagery. ● Suggest employees who are expected to use social media for business purposes maintain a separate and distinct personal account for their personal use. If the business account is in the company’s name, then that stays with the company if the employee leaves. ● Require senior management’s approval before posting anything of significance such as a new initiative. However, require multiple people (preferably with diverse backgrounds and perspectives) to review the posting or concept first to be more likely to catch offensive or problematic issues before they are made public. Be sure employees feel free to come forward with their concerns.
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Personal Use of Social Media
An employee’s personal use of social media is often used to connect with friends and family, to find items of interest, forward information they find important, and convey their own thoughts, opinions and experiences. Because these personal views can impact your business, it is important to know what employers can and cannot do. What you can do: ● Prohibit the employee’s use of social media during working hours to avoid impacts on productivity and to limit connection with the company. However, you cannot restrict an employee from using social media during non-work time such as during meal or rest breaks. ● You may be able to prohibit employees from using company resources (computers/tablets) for social media
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n Building Products Digest n March 2021
only if you prohibit all other personal use. You must apply this policy across the board and discipline employees equally for the personal use of company resources. What you cannot do: ● If an employee’s posts relate to the working conditions for themselves or others, they have more freedoms. Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), all employees have the right to protected concerted activity (PCA) such as complaining about low wages, sub-par work conditions, or poor management. Whistleblower and public policy laws protect employees who use social media to shed light on a company’s illegal or unethical actions. Typically, as long as the posts do not violate other policies such as confidentiality, non-discrimination/harassment/sexual harassment, code of ethics/conduct, they are legal. ● In states that have off-duty conduct protection laws, an employee cannot be disciplined for posting about something they did off-hours as long as it is legal.
What about Freedom of Speech?
Employees and employers need to know that, in most workplaces, there is no freedom of speech at work or when using social media. Unless protected as mentioned previously, employees can be held accountable for their words, actions, or behaviors which are deemed unacceptable or that violate company policy.
Policies to Implement
To allow your company to take action when necessary, you should implement and consistently enforce the following policies: Building-Products.com
