| Your Employee Wants to Be Your “Friend”-What Now? |
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| Written by Bill Maltarich |
| Wednesday, 04 November 2009 20:16 |
As a manager should you accept Facebook friend requests from your employees?
A recent survey by Robert Half Technology found that fifty four percent of the Chief Information Officers responding indicate that their organizations completely prohibit employees from any online social networking activities while at work. Twenty-six percent allow the use for business purposes only. However, there is no clear answer to the question of whether employee use of social networking sites impacts productivity positively or negatively.Whether you want to prohibit, encourage or limit the use of social networking sites by employees, your intentions should be clearly articulated and communicated. This policy should be consistent with the current policies on use of office phones, cell phones, email or the internet. The bottom line is that company policies need to be developed, clearly communicated and enforced consistently. However, only 17% of companies report having such a policy in place today. So if you are the boss who is being asked to be a friend of an employee what should you do? Seven out of ten surveyed executives reported they were uncomfortable being friended by employees. Most importantly, you should abide by your company policy if one exists. If your company does not have a prohibition to accepting the friend request I suggest you accept it. If you accept one request then I suggest you accept all of your employees’ friend requests. Once you have accepted the friend requests, a responsible manager will follow these recommendations: If you do not want a lot of people to see a post then do not put it on line. There is no excuse for posting embarrassing content. Postings tend to get passed around, especially controversial ones. Do not post anything you would not say in person. Ask yourself if you would you want to see this content on the front page of the local news and attributed to you? Legally anything you post on the website is considered the same as if it were verbal. Understand and use the site privacy tools and use them to restrict what information is shared with employees. You probably do not want to share all your personal information or pictures with employees, your boss or other colleagues. Never comment on employee job performance on these sites. Some sites encourage members recommending others. Managers should never enter into this type of activity. Comments you make can be accessed during legal proceedings long after they have been deleted. In summary, the use of social networking in the workplace is new and evolving. I recommend you become familiar with the use this technology but be cautious about what you post and how you use what you read on the pages of others. Using caution and prudence, you can find ways to make these new communication tools work for you and your company. Remember that similar challenges were presented when the telephones, fax machines and internet were introduced into the workplace. Those challenges were met and became an integral part of how we all do business. And what business today doesn’t depend on the internet? Tags: Social Networking |
As we look at this let’s review where we are relative to this technology. More than 300 million folks are now on Facebook and many of them are using social networking sites while at work.SCORE Newsflash
| SCORE Naples Goes Gardening With the EDC |
Score Naples and the Economic Development Council of Collier County (EDC) are working together on the Economic Gardening Initiative, a program designed to help companies in Collier County, with between 10 and 99 employees, grow their businesses. Economic Gardening is an entrepreneurial approach to economic development first pioneered in Littleton, Colorado in 1989. The focus is on creating a nurturing ,environment for growing local entrepreneurs rather than "hunting" or recruiting businesses from elsewhere - it has been remarkably effective and now Collier County companies are about to benefit. Score will be there to help. The state of Florida has set aside $10 million for an Economic Gardening pilot program, $8,500,000 of which is for loans to 2nd Stage companies and $1,500,000 is for technical assistance programs to be administered by the Florida Economic Gardening Institute at UCF in Orlando. |
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