Using HR to protect business from social media risks

Information technology is so intricately and inextricably woven into the fabric of our daily lives that it is almost inconceivable to think of a working day without it.

Indeed, with many organisations using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to raise the profile of their businesses, personal and professional personas are increasingly indistinct.

A few well-publicised cases of unacceptable use of IT have highlighted the need for employers to draw a distinction between what is acceptable and what is inappropriate IT and internet use at work.

Other than cannibalising your data allocation and bandwidth, what is the harm of allowing your employees carte blanche access to the internet? Consider this:

If your employees are on social networking sites, they are not working. This loss of productivity directly impacts on your bottom line.
Any adverse comments from disgruntled employees about your business circulate in the ether indefinitely.
Your intellectual property and any commercially sensitive information could be at risk.

What can you do to protect your business and ensure that your employees clearly understand your expectations of performance and behaviour?

Many organisations think that training or simply telling people not to misuse company IT is the answer. And it is...but not in the traditional sense.

If it were that simple, recent cases of people losing their jobs after broadcasting their dissatisfaction with their employers on Facebook or MySpace may not have occurred.  

To be effective the training/telling has to be more subtle and surreptitious. After all, despite the focus on IT, it is human behaviour that we are addressing and that can hardly be considered simple!

An employment relationship officially starts with the signing of an employment agreement/ This, then, is a logical place to document your expectations and ensure that both you and your employee are literally on the same page before you even assign them a login.

Dismissal is a possible outcome if the employee directly breaches an express term in an employment agreement. However, the ideal would be to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.