Can employees diss your company on the Internet and get away with it? In a growing number of cases, the answer is No.
Last December, Time Magazine named as its Person of the Year—a title usually reserved for world leaders and Nobel Prize winners—“You.” They even attached a mirror to the magazine so that “You” could see your picture on the cover.
Time editors were recognizing that the Internet has let just about anyone with a computer stake a claim to fame these days, by writing a blog, creating a personal Web page on sites such as MySpace.com, or starring in a personal video on sites like YouTube.com. Through the power of the net, whatever they do then becomes available for the whole world to see.
What the new stars of the Net probably don’t count on, though, is that among their audience are employers. And while Internet celebrity can make you famous, it can also cost you your job. There’s even a name for this phenomenon … getting “dooced.” The name comes from a blog whose creator met that fate.
There have been two paths to losing … or not getting … a job via the Internet: One starts with the fact that, increasingly, employers on the hire are looking past pristine resumes and rock-solid interviews to other expressions of their candidate’s minds.
“I can’t believe how many employers are looking at MySpace.com now,” says Barbara Harper of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce. “If employees see pictures … of an applicant partying, is that going to affect their prospects if they look like a binge drinker?”
Knocking the Boss Online
The other path to unemployment opens when bloggers, mistakenly, as it turns out, think their blogs are private, protected, or untraceable and then use them to knock bosses or co-workers, or to reveal future products or other company secrets.
In fact, blogs are not protected, either under free speech rights (which don’t apply to private companies) or the freedom of the press provisions of the Constitution, say legal experts. And, especially if written on company computers and/or company time, they have no protection under privacy rules. This is true even if the blogger uses his or her private outside-provider account on a company computer.
Some experts similarly believe that there is no protection against employment actions based on disparaging or untrue remarks about the company, even if the blogger uses a personal computer at home to make them. “Obviously, people shouldn’t be blogging on work time,” says Charleston, W.Va., employment law attorney Roger Wolfe. “But blogging from home is no insulation from workplace discipline.”
To be sure you stand on secure ground about taking a worker to task about blogging, experts suggest having a written policy that:
–Prohibits the publication of either employer or client proprietary information
–Bans negative remarks about the company, management, and co-workers
–Outlaws the use of company time or equipment to post to personal blogs
Be sure to also put employees on notice that they’re being monitored, and that not only blogs but also instant messages, e-mails, and even cell phone text messages are covered under this policy. Let them also know that the way technology works, even if the delete key is pressed, every message leaves an electronic trail that’s both traceable to them and accessible by you.
How can you have a written policy that, as a blanket statement, “Bans negative remarks about the company, management, and co-workers” ? Doesn’t a policy like that fly in the face of the first amendment to the constitution? Worded as it is here, that says to me that I can’t even grouse about my employer to my best friend over a drink at the local pub.