Aliah D. Wright is a manager and online editor for the Society for Human Resource Management and an expert on HR technology and social media trends. She is a former reporter and copy editor for the Greenville News, a former copy editor with the Harrisburg Patriot-News, a former general assignment reporter and political correspondent for the Associated Press in Pennsylvania, and formerly headed entertainment coverage for all of Gannett newspapers, including the nation’s largest daily, USA Today.

A Necessary Evil

By Aliah D. Wright

Society For Human Resource Management

Copyright © 2013 Society for Human Resource Management
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58644-341-2

Contents

Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Foreword,
Chapter 1. It’s Social Media: Forget Control, Adopt Integration,
Chapter 2. What Is Social Media?,
Chapter 3. Reconsidering Your Expectations, or All Work and No Play Makes Jack and Jill Dull Employees,
Chapter 4. Why Social Media Engagement Is Important, or Why Facebook and Twitter, and LinkedIn Are Not Evil,
Chapter 5. Embracing Social Media,
Chapter 6. Social Recruiting, or Why Job Boards Should Be Afraid of It,
Chapter 7. Online Safety,
Chapter 8. Productivity: Your Perception Might Not Fit Reality,
Chapter 9. Selling Social Media to Your CEO,
Chapter 10. Why You Need a Social Media Evangelist,
Chapter 11. Rules Are Rules,
Chapter 12. Making It Fit,
Endnotes,
Index,
About the Author,
Additional SHRM Resources,

CHAPTER 1

It’s Social Media: Forget Control, Adopt Integration

She walks into your office and hands you a sheet of paper. It is a printout of a colleague’s Facebook status update. It reads: “This place is a hellhole. If I had a car today I would up and quit.”

The above post is a real Facebook status update taken from a discussion on HR Talk, the Society for Human Resource Management’s bulletin board. The question posed was: “What should be the next step for the manager? Discussion? Termination? Nothing?”

Good question. Employers are responding in myriad ways to the things their employees do on social networking sites — after the fact.

Consider these real-life scenarios:

1. HMV, an entertainment retailer in Britain, laid off nearly 200 employees on January 31, 2013. Someone on the company’s social media team used the Twitter account to send out this tweet:

“We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!! #hmvXFactorFiring.” Within 30 minutes that tweet had gone viral, and several other people within the company began tweeting about the mass terminations. Another tweet followed:

“Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask ‘How do I shut down Twitter?'” #hmvXFactorFiring.”

2. In another case, “an employee … decided that she was going to take a picture of a co-worker’s cubicle” and post it “to her Facebook page with a status like ‘slob’ or something along those lines,” Janine Truitt, senior HR representative at Brookhaven National Laboratory said of an incident relayed to her. The woman “was friends with a few of the clients of this company and they saw the picture and commented. It became a joke online [until] one of those clients print-screened the page and sent it to her boss.” The woman who posted the photo was fired, and “two other employees were cited for similar derogatory writing on [the Facebook post],” Truitt said.

3. Shortly after President Barack Obama was elected, the president’s then-chief speechwriter, 27-year-old Jon Favreau, was seen in a Facebook photo groping a cardboard cutout of newly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as someone else placed a bottle of beer to her lips. Favreau apologized and kept his position until he resigned in March 2013.

4. Who could forget the infamous “Cisco Fatty” tweet?

In 2009, 22-year-old Connor Riley reportedly tweeted this to the world: “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

Afterward Tim Levad, who was affiliated with Cisco, fired back:

“Who is the hiring manager? I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

Riley did not get the job.

5. Sergeant. Gary Stein, a nine-year military veteran was cited for misconduct and a military panel suggested he be dishonorably discharged and lose his pension and security clearance for posting disparaging comments about President Obama on his Facebook page.

6. Dr. June Talvitie-Siple lost her $92,000-a-year job as a high-school supervisor for math and science in Cohasset, Massachusetts, after parents found comments on her Facebook page referring to students as “germ bags” and town residents as “arrogant and snobby.”

Now, let’s say for example, some employees you supervise go on Facebook on their own time and disparage your company publicly in a profane manner and the post goes viral.

The ensuing publicity creates a firestorm, and it is a huge disaster for your firm. Your CEO walks into your office and demands to know whether you can fire these people.

What do you say? Do you know anything about labor relations law and whether employees’ have the right to have discussions about work on the Internet — whether they are in the office or at home? Do you have a social media policy? Most companies do not. In fact, research from SHRM in 2011 revealed that companies with 99 or fewer employees were less likely to have a policy compared with organizations with 100 or more employees.

As a manager, you need to get in front of situations like this before they happen and before they ruin your company’s reputation (or cost you your job). In the case of HMV, perhaps confiscating the password to the company’s main social media accounts and acting with transparency about pending layoffs could have averted the social media firestorm, which obviously ensued because the employees were shocked to find out they were being let go.

The days of employers controlling the message are gone — in HMV’s case, however, the employer could have softened the blow by trusting its employees with the news of the impending layoffs before the last possible moment, especially given the company had been having financial problems.

Now, let’s take a look at the case of American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc.

In 2010 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — a federal agency that protects the rights of employees to organize to better their working conditions and pay — issued a complaint against American Medical Response after it fired an employee who used her home computer to post a profanity-laced tirade about her supervisor on her personal Facebook page (the post included comments from some of her co-workers). It was quickly dubbed “the Facebook Firing Case” by the press. The NLRB for the first time found that an employee’s Facebook posts were protected speech, meaning employees have the right to complain about working conditions — even online. It also found that the company’s blogging and Internet posting policy had illegal guidelines — including one that kept employees from making disparaging comments when talking about their organization or its supervisors and another that prohibited employees from depicting the company in any way over the Internet without company permission.

There are dozens of stories like these — real stories — of employees engaging in odd or egregious behavior on social networking sites, so many in fact, we could fill an entire book about them. How are business leaders, managers, and HR professionals handling situations like these? Some are handling them as they appear — on a case-by-case basis. Others are following policies they have instituted and are consulting attorneys or ignoring them altogether.

What is right? What is wrong?

As a reporter and editor for SHRM Online and HR Magazine, publications of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), an organization dedicated to assisting human resource professionals, I have witnessed the birth of social media and the ever-evolving use of social networking. I have been adventurous in my career as an editor and reporter. It was in that spirit that I hopped on Twitter in 2009 when the former chief operating officer of SHRM, China Gorman, went on the site to engage HR professionals. I, too, was leery at first (especially about putting my profile on LinkedIn) and then venturing on to Facebook and just about every other social networking site mentioned in this book. As a social media “lurker” initially, and then an active contributor, I have watched in fascination at the power social media has to transform lives. I have also learned a lot, too — and as journalist, one of the things I love about my career is how much I have learned through social interactions — on and off the web. My colleagues and I have spoken to hundreds of HR professionals — experts and novices of social media who are curious, concerned, and enthralled by the ability this new communication mechanism possesses to change and enhance lives. Yet, too many companies, whether from fear, confusion, or a stubborn inability to embrace change, are continuing to ban employee use of what has essentially become our new telephone.

It is my hope that this book — which draws from dozens of interviews, research, and best practices of HR professionals operating within the social realm — will provide guidance on how to handle bad situations — hopefully before they occur. But as managers, to do that you must understand how social media works, how it has changed the landscape of the professional work environment, which networks employees are using, how they are using them, how often, and when (basically 24/7).

Good companies pay attention to the social networking sites their customers and employees inhabit. They watch their behaviors; they listen to their concerns; they apologize when their companies make mistakes; they are transparent and honest; and they engage their audiences and employees to foster growth, increase brand awareness, and tap their collective knowledge to improve their bottom lines.

If you are unaware of how social networking sites operate, what their culture is like, and how people behave on these sites, your employees’ activities there may affect your company in any number of ways. Can employees really write whatever they want on a social networking site? (Um, yes). Should they? Are they entitled to privacy on social networking sites — whether they are engaging in social media activities while at work or on weekends, on their own devices? How private is private when it is shared with 250 “friends?” What is HR to do?

As social media continues its metamorphosis, employers must have a grasp on its uses, not just within the social realm, but within the business context as well. Social media is not a waste of time or a fad. It can enhance business strategy and provide analytics to foster corporate growth and development as well as help employees find solutions and come up with innovative ideas — even as they network with colleagues, peers, and “friends.”

Anyone who manages employees who access social media from the palms of their hands must stay abreast of the constantly shifting ways social media does all these things while helping employees maintain productivity and avoid damaging reputations. In addition, managers must help employees be mindful of corporate values while safeguarding corporate data. This resource will help managers guide employees in their use of such sites while balancing productivity and will help HR professionals set policies that do both.

Change is never easy. Yet we live in a world that is changing every single day. Social media is a new ever evolving tool that can help expand our knowledge and our reach and help us innovate and collaborate in bold, new ways.

Embrace it.

CHAPTER 2

What Is Social Media?

It’s Facebook. It’s Twitter. It’s LinkedIn. It’s Google’s Blogger and Google+ , YouTube, and niche site SHRM Connect. It’s Instagram and Pinterest. It’s Quora and GetGlue. It’s Foursquare, Myspace (yes, people are still using it), Imgur, Fancy, Reddit, Yammer, Chatter, Posterous, Path, Second Life, Letterboxd, Viddy, and now the many games through Zynga.

It’s deviantART, LiveJournal, Tagged, Orkut, CafeMom, Ning, Meetup, myLife, myYearbook, and Badoo. Even Pandora has a social networking component. Social media is niche communities of practice where doctors, scientists, technophobes, youngsters, singletons, Boomers, and Millennials are congregating to share, engage, meet, and innovate online. It is also podcasting and the many blog sites like Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, and Storify.

This list is not conclusive or exhaustive — not by any means. New social sites appear seemingly every day. Social media is any website or mobile application (“app”) that allows people to connect and engage others in direct dialogue — without editorial filters — a scary concept for most corporations fearful that employees will damage their brands. For HR professionals and people managers everywhere it can either be a bane to their existence or a really, really cool collaboration tool.

Social media is, in a nutshell, content generated by online users. It is back-and-forth communication. It’s engaging with people, whether near or far, in ways that have never been done before. It’s pervasive and invasive. But more important is that it’s not going anywhere.

NEWS FLASH: THIS IS THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE. GET OVER IT

Let’s face it. Your employees are already on Facebook, Google Blogger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Google+ and will most certainly be on whatever shiny, new social network that has not been developed yet but will probably be just as hip and exciting. They are adding their comments and expressing their opinions under articles and blogs and in other forums as well. They are not using their desktop computers, either. Most are deploying social media from an iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone, Kindle Fire, or other device. They are using it in their cars (hopefully not while driving), under their desks, and in the bathroom.

“If employees can’t access social media, they’re cut off from their peers and the news. It’s isolating and unrealistic,” Raleigh, North Carolina-based HR consultant Laurie Ruettimann told me during an interview. “Your employees are not robots. They don’t show up 9 to 5 and just work. They bring their lives in with them and you want them to go out externally and understand what’s happening in the world and bring that back into your workforce,” she said. Social media does just that.

So forget about stopping them from chatting on Facebook, huddling on Google, tweeting, or playing Angry Birds, FarmVille, Scramble, Draw Something, or Words with Friends. All of the sites have become so tightly woven into our lives with more than a billion people using them that expecting employees to curtail these activities at work — particularly members of Generation Y, who have grown up working and playing (otherwise known as multitasking) — is futile at best and most likely unrealistic.

Consider Cisco’s 2012 Connected Word Technology report. In a news release, Cisco stated that

“while two out of five [respondents] said their company’s policy forbids them to use company-issued devices for non-work activities, nearly three out of four (71 percent) said they don’t always obey those policies.

The craving to stay connected means that the lines between work and social life/family life are blurring. People check for work updates and communicate at all hours from every place imaginable. Time is elastic: For Generation Y there are no clear markers between the workday and personal time — both blend and overlap throughout the day and night.”

In fact, some studies show job candidates trust companies more when they are allowed to use social media. “Within those companies that successfully use internal social media tools (Yammer, Chatter, etc.), employees are 60 percent more likely to give their employer the benefit of the doubt during a crisis, 67 percent more likely to support government policies that their company supports, and 39 percent more likely to recommend their company’s products and services to friends and family members outside of the company. In general, we’re seeing in our research that social media can be a powerful tool for empowering employees to become eager and proactive brand ambassadors willing to share ownership of their company’s reputation,” Scott Healy, a researcher with Gagen MacDonald, wrote in January 2013. Healy also shared his research with me for the book.

No one is advocating letting employees run wild, however — quite the opposite. There are rules. Of course there are rules! You are in charge, after all. Laying out the ground rules will help you help employees be productive and engaged. But you have to use the tools to know how they work.

As NPR senior director of talent acquisition & innovation Lars Schmidt told me during an interview, “social media allows you the ability to watch and observe thought leaders who are present in the space and see what they’re reading, sharing, discussing, and see who they’re interacting with.” It’s a window into a world of information unlike any other. It gives HR professionals the opportunity to connect with peers “in any field in any region throughout the world,” Schmidt added. “Social media is the great enabler of communication.”

As a social media advocate, journalist, and student and a power user of these tools, my goal is to inform executives, HR professionals, hiring managers, and supervisors of the benefits of allowing employees to use social media and to walk away with realistic expectations. Job performance will not be thrown out the window. Rather, this approach requires trust and transparency — from the worker and the employer.

After all, you are not hiring stupid people. So why treat them like nitwits after you have given them jobs?

(Continues…)Excerpted from A Necessary Evil by Aliah D. Wright. Copyright © 2013 Society for Human Resource Management. Excerpted by permission of Society For Human Resource Management.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.