Your Employees and Social Media: What You Need to Know

By Rieva Lesonsky

Are you using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to market your business? Are you concerned about what’s being said about your company, your products and your services online? Even if your business is not actively involved in social media as a promotional tool, word can be spreading about your company on social media via your employees.

You may not stop to think about what your employees say and do on their personal social media accounts and how it affects your business. But, as Human Resources Executive Online recently reported, more and more companies are finding that what their employees say on social media can have a negative effect on their company image and reputation.

If an employee criticizes you or a co-worker, says something negative about your company’s policies or products, or vents about something he or she thinks is unfair in the workplace, all of this can affect others’ opinions of your business as a place to work and a place to patronize.

But how much control do you have over what your employees say and do on their personal social media accounts? Human Resources Executive Online warns us to tread carefully when dealing with this area. Under the National Labor Relations Act, employers cannot interfere with an employee’s right to take part in “protected and concerted activity,” which is typically defined to mean discussions or actions related to working conditions.

Human Resources Executive Online reports that the National Labor Relations Board is getting more involved in cases where employer rules prohibit employees for engaging in this type of activity on social media. The article cites several examples, and while it’s difficult to draw hard-and-fast rules from the Board’s rulings so far, a discussion on Facebook about something an employee thinks is unfair in your workplace, for example, could conceivably be protected speech.

Given that this issue is so sensitive, it’s a good idea to develop a policy for how your employees can use social media both in and out of the workplace. Many small businesses don’t have any such policy in place.

A basic starting point is for your policy to state that employees have no expectation of privacy if they’re using social media on company time using employer-provided computers or email accounts. While you can’t prohibit employees from posting or discussing topics related to wages, hours and working conditions, you can word your policy in such a way that libelous, abusive or threatening comments, or those that reveal proprietary information that could help competitors, can be prohibited both in and out of the workplace.

Since this is a new and contentious area of workplace employment law, it’s best to consult an attorney who’s familiar with these issues in developing your policy. After all, your business’s reputation could be at stake.

Image by Flickr user Roger Price (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Business Law, Compliance, Small Business, small business, social media, Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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