With the rise in popularity of social networks, and the number of employees who use them, concerns over how to protect your company’s information becomes an issue.
45% of employees are allowed to use social media during work hours
According to a recent study, 45% of employees are allowed to use social media during work hours (either for personal or business) which means that for almost half of all organizations have employees who are engaged online while at work. What does this mean?
Say for instance that John Smith, who works at a technology company in a big city, is working on a major project with a tight deadline. His company has invested a lot of money already but they are still behind schedule and if they don’t get back on pace soon they are in danger of losing the client. John’s role in the project is a major one and if he completes his task on time then the entire project can be brought back up to schedule. However, John is having trouble on one part of the programming and is worried he won’t be able to finish on time.
So, while taking a break on Linkedin, John updates his status saying “This project is killing me…probably not going to finish on time 
”. To John, this is a harmless status update but to one of his connections on Linkedin, Sam, this is far from harmless. You see, Sam is the project manager at the client for which John’s company is doing the work. Spotting this update from John, who knows that John has a crucial part in this project, he immediately calls his boss, who phones John’s boss and they call an urgent meeting to discuss the project. Thing is, John was just a little stressed out but is very capable of finishing the project on time; however, Sam’s boss has heard enough and they end up dropping John’s company as the contractor. Subsequently, John is fired.
Now, this is a simple example of what is a seemingly harmless status update. However, it escalated into John’s company losing the client and ultimately John losing his job.
Although this is a fictional example, there are many cases of employees sharing information about their job, their clients, a product/deal, writing offensive posts and other sensitive information which shouldn’t be made public. For some humorous examples, read 30 Ways to Lost a Job on Twitter. However, what’s stopping John, or others like him, from sharing whatever information he feels like sharing?
Unfortunately, there is no magic answer. How this is managed depends entirely on the company itself and their Code of Ethics, their Privacy policy, or whatever other systems they have in place. However, how they apply this raises the issue of personal privacy. Because the employees are using a company computer to access the social network, but since the information is stored on non-company servers, what authority do company’s have over what an employee puts in their profile and what they share online?
Just like an organization has an agreement which employees sign stating that they must respect sensitive data, so too does an organization need a document which applies to social networks. Many organizations assign code names to internal projects so if word does get out, it doesn’t breach the privacy of the project. It’s important to be proactive because it’s not an easy task to monitor the activities of all employees, but it’s within the right of the organization to require that an employee follow certain guidelines while using social networks on company time.
Here are a few suggestions to keep your company’s information secure:
1. In the description of an employee’s current job, have them use the description from the public job description so as to keep any specifics (such as the names of projects) private
2. Require that employees don’t talk about the specifics of any projects when updating their status, writing a blog, etc. Many organizations have a company blog (Direct2Dell)
3. Require that employees make their profiles private (or protect their tweets) so that only their friends will be able to see their profile information
Above all else, you need to establish trust with your employees. If they get angry with their job, they can easily share information, which shouldn’t be shared, with anyone they want using Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or many others. How your employees respect you on social networks all begins with your organization respecting them.