Office Over Easy

Where an employee works is a part of who they are but unless they are pretty high up in the company or engaged as a corporate branding tool, then it’s not everything that they are online. I think CIO Magazine is wrong in promoting the practice of telling management that employees should identify their tweets as personal. I don’t disagree with everything in the article – read the part at the bottom where they encourage companies to work with their employees to decide what the right thing to do is. Often times I find that employees recommend a MORE restrictive approach and this is why I say it’s worth trusting your employees to identify themselves as employees without suggesting that they must go a step further and quantify that the tweet is personal. Let’s face it; if they say something bad about the company, they’re still going to get fired. The ‘personal’ requirement isn’t protecting anyone, but it’s making the employee look paranoid.

Look at Jessica Bennett, Senior Writer for Newsweek. She and Jesse Ellison started a blog called Equality Myth based on an article they wrote for Newsweek about sexism at Newsweek. They actually REMOVED their original disclaimer that the project was personal and are now talking about the possibility that the magazine will mention the blog on their home page. This is a company that faced their own gender discrimination and is challenging other companies to do the same. Sounds like a great place for a female journalist to work. At least she knows she can have an honest discussion on the topic with her new employer.  

While the possibility of press like this is frightening for most companies, I still say companies who are ruled by fear are working under an outdated model of employee relations. This model is probably the reason why a lot of companies are struggling to keep Gen X and Y employees for more than 3-5 years. It's all about work-life balance for these folks. When you treat a professional like a child, especially a young professional, then it’s only a matter of time before they go somewhere where they are trusted and respected. For the most part, most people behave. Better yet, most people want to do the right thing for the company. Encouraging employees to have outside interests and discuss non-professional goals is a huge opportunity for a company to get involved with more community-related projects. Instead of picking the fundraisers first and asking for employees to volunteer later, why not create a nomination process and a vote on your LinkedIn group for where the company will donate year after year? Make social networking an optional part of the employee experience.

If you already have a policy that indicates that there is no assumption of privacy when using corporate equipment or online communications like email, then you’ve already done enough to keep people cautious. I’m not saying mistakes aren’t made and or that companies don’t need to mitigate risk, but mitigate it; don’t suffocate your employees over it.

It makes more sense to me to…

-          … educate people on what they can’t tweet about (consult the regulatory agencies in your industry).

-          … make it optional for new hires to fill in their Twitter ID on the employee application and monitor those feeds as part of other monitoring activities like incoming/outgoing email. Whether you follow your employees or not, always monitor tweets with the company name in them.

-          … set up a zero-tolerance policy on tainting the brand.

But there is a fine line between doing these things and defining a person – insisting employees put a disclaimer on their online identity. If it’s better for me to not admit that I work for your company, then you are missing a huge opportunity for me to be an evangelist for the company. An optional etiquette class sends a much different message than making everyone pass a quiz on what inappropriate social networking behavior looks like but I’d rather see the later than feel like my company doesn’t want to claim me. Why would I want to work for an organization that’s not proud of me?

Social networking is a two-way street. If you take care of your employees, they are going to brag about that experience. You want them to brag about that experience. Why treat employees any different than customers? If you want to build your brand, then you need to open up the number of people allowed to say the company name. It’s much more expensive to convince a customer to give you a good review than it is for an employee to express pride in the company’s fundraising efforts. People are separated enough from the company when they tweet under their own name. When people are tweeting, they probably aren’t tweeting about the company all the time. If they are, then you’ll see their name appear quite a bit while monitoring the brand name and you can take issue with that individual or give them a transfer to the marketing department and make their tweets official. I’m just saying that there are two ways to look at the same risk.

Tell your employees something like this:

“We love that you want to tweet and we hope that if you speak of us that you will be kind. Here’s a reminder on the couple of things that will get us in big trouble if you say them and here are some tips on etiquette that will get you more followers and make the tool more relevant to you. One last word of caution – since we consider Twitter a personal endeavor, we expect you to spend your personal time on the tool. Feel free to check it on your lunch break but don’t let your boss hear from one of your co-workers that you’re on it all the time.”

And… we’re done. Truthfully, it can be done with even less direction. Check out this 140-character Twitter Policy. My issue with most corporate blogging and social networking policies is they assume that everyone is going to complain about working there. I understand about managing risk and being prepared when PR disaster strikes, but if your employees are entering this space for the sole purpose of giving the company a bad name, then your issue isn’t social media. It’s much bigger than that. Consider that Google, rated one of the best places to work in America by Fortune magazine in 2009 has over 2 million followers on their main Twitter feed. See how NetApp and Cisco are using their feeds. I think a lot of companies are entering into social media without a focus on at least one of their employees – a face to the feed. What’s my incentive to follow a company on Twitter when all I get is links to press releases? It’s the difference between a newspaper and a magazine. Twitter is more like a magazine. We want personality. Many companies would prefer not to have one of those. Pity. Young investors in their 20’s have the most time to wait out stock fluctuations and are typically advised to put more than 50% of their 401(k) into equities. I think to enter into this space without the goal of appealing to employees of all ages is a mistake. Public perception comes as a result of what your employees say about the company.

Consider the case of Ryan at Yahoo! who tweeted his last day at the company. I’d rather manage a company where a laid-off employee is sad to go (even it was just because of the free lattes) than try to mitigate the online risks of a company with unhappy employees. It’s a red flag for me when I see a company try to lock down this new environment. Consider that 21% of employees would turn a job down if they felt the company had web policies that were too strict (i.e., blocking social networking sites). Start thinking about what it takes to be an ideal social organization. Start thinking about how much people would want to work for a company that publically recognized good performance. I think that public recommendations on LinkedIn should be a part of a person’s annual review – each person should recommend at least one person and their boss should solicit a recommendation on their behalf from someone in the business they worked with. This is important. This is a person’s online identity. Go search the internet for your name and what do you find? Your online profiles! As more and more companies expect employees to always be plugged in via a company phone and remote access to e-mail, you cannot expect a person to separate themselves from their job when they walk out of the office. It’s a double standard. When we meet someone for the first time, what do we ask them? “So, what do you do? Where do you work?” It’s the first thing people use to define a new relationship with someone. Why wouldn’t I include it on my profile?!

Looking through 13 tweets that got people fired, you have to notice a trend here. The employee is the one who lost out and not the company or the brand. The message is clear and no one disputes it – there are some things you simply don’t say. The company won’t have to beat it into the culture either. Mentors will put this alongside advice like, “Don’t dip your pen in the company ink.” Here’s your corporate reality check - if you aren’t proud of the people you hire, then why did you hire them in the first place? If I’m such a horrible person online, then maybe you need to revisit your HR policy to include Social Media background checks. I don’t understand this concept of privacy before a person is hired when most companies have something to say about a person’s lack of it after they’re hired. We do drug tests and background checks. I’d much rather scare someone out of the interview queue with the concept of an online background check than hire someone who is going to be a problem online. Isn’t the first rule of risk mitigation to ensure a disaster doesn’t happen? It’s the difference between creating a fire extinguisher and using fireproof materials to build your house. You need both. Don’t settle for the disaster plan without doing the work to lay a good social networking foundation.

For existing employees, they are more likely to be responsible when they are trusted. To do anything less is treating your employees like children and not like business partners. Start asking your employees how they want to use it, how they will govern the community, and how to make it more relevant to their job. At Dell, they feature employees who use Twitter and those folks don’t have to put ‘PERSONAL’ in all caps in their profile. And don’t let those corporate lawyers fool you. Plenty of them are on Twitter too.