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AS113750797 MONITOR SOCMEDIA LGEver since social media became popular back in about 2004, there has been growing concern among employers about the amount of time employees spend online.

It’s one thing for workers to do it during their breaks, but the medium has evolved to the point where some employees can spend the entire day looking as if they are working and achieving nothing in that time.

This issue has been a major bone of contention with employers, who, over time, have introduced a range of policies aimed at limiting the amount of time workers spend being social.

The Monitoring Mess

You can’t manage what you don’t know, so monitoring has a big role in reducing employees’ social media usage during work time and controlling what they do with it. Many companies have tried to monitor their staff’s activities, to determine whether they are genuinely on social media or are spending their time on work.

[quotes]Over the past 10 years, corporate America has taken multiple positions on whether it is legal to monitor their employee usage or not.[/quotes] Many of these depended on issues such as ownership of the computer, the premises on which the access occurred, and contractually binding employee agreements.

Where Are We Now?

Currently, there are no federal laws that prohibit an employer from monitoring employees on social networking sites. It’s possible to do so simply by installing software on company computers or hiring third-party vendors to monitor online activity.

Some companies take the step of blocking access through the network to specific sites, such as Facebook, for example, but of course that doesn’t prevent employees from accessing the platforms using a mobile device.

So, the question becomes, what actions can you take with regard to employees’ use of social media in the workplace? [quotesright]The answer is you can’t stop it, but you can hopefully take steps to prevent it from damaging your business. [/quotesright]

Crafting a Clear Policy

To maintain trust among your employees, it’s best to have a clear social media policy that outlines what your company considers acceptable behavior. Some of the topics such a policy should cover include:

Most business owners wish their employees would keep their work and personal lives separate, but it’s not safe to assume that will happen. If you are concerned that your staff may be spending too much work time on social media or worry about exposure through an unintentional act, you can create a policy aimed at informing them when and how they can do so and minimizing the harm of interaction by including approved criteria like the points above.

Primary Pros and Cons

Creating a policy like this has several pros and cons, of course. Benefits include being able to collect usage data about the staff, including some personal information, and having recourse to fall back on if you discover they have tweeted something potentially damaging about your company. Disadvantages, however, include the loss of employee privacy. That is because an algorithm or application designed to track an employee’s social activities might unwittingly gather personal biometrics or health information. [quotesright]Somebody could potentially use this data to jeopardize the person’s chances of a promotion or other opportunity. [/quotesright]

It will be a fine line for companies to navigate between corporate social media policies and employee rights, and many states are already grappling with the issue. For any company executive team currently strategizing for the coming 12-24 months, it is essential to decide how your positions on social media usage and representation align with your company ideals. And then, make the policy an integral part of your employment process.

Resources:

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c4bef3a6-9ef1-4018-8b29-2e08db592bf3 https://www.natlawreview.com/article/nlrb-approves-workplace-social-media-policy-limiting-employees-online-communications

https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news/2021/01/29/hr-social-media-politics-employment-policies.html

https://blogs.lawyers.com/attorney/labor-and-employment/can-my-employer-monitor-my-social-media-accounts-67140/

https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news/2021/01/29/hr-social-media-politics-employment-policies.html

https://www.fchn.com/documents/doc/newsletters/20080311%20-%20pap_newsletter_spring_04.pdf

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