There seem to be two extremes for how employers use the transparency of the information age to manage the impact that their employees “off time” speech has on the company and its reputation.
On one end, you have employers that act oblivious to information culture until it slams their company image into the mud. I recently helped a small
manufacturing company that learned one morning how one of its employees shot a police officer after being stopped for drunk driving. There was nothing in the company’s HR files that would have raised concerns about this worker. In just a few minutes, however, we — and the news media — found his MySpace page. And there for the world to see were pictures of this guy posing with a gun in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other, along with heroic references to the Los Angeles bank robbers who used automatic weapons in an infamous 1997 police shootout.
Way on the other end, however, some employers are punishing workers who express even non-threatening personality and opinions via email, blogs, social networking sites and Web pages. "The same technology giving workers new avenues for expression is giving employers new ways to police it,” says Bruce Barry, a Vanderbilt sociology professor and author of Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace. “That blog or email intended to do nothing more than let off some steam after a tough day could become an alarm bell calling into question the employee’s judgment or stability.”
Barry argues that the nation’s legal system gives employers wide latitude to suppress or punish worker speech, which far too many use even when it has little to do with the job or business.
To be sure, these are complicated, goofy times. But employers and employees can prosper together if they all recognize that information technology and social media have leveled the playing field, not given one side the advantage over the other.
Employers have as just as much right as anyone to use information technology to investigate their potential new hires, or to see what current employees are saying in company emails and on the public Internet. Employees have a right to free speech but no guarantee to keep their job if they criticize the boss, upload pictures of their violent fantasies or give away company secrets they don’t agree with. And employers can’t hope to keep good people or a marketable brand reputation if they become known as a place that persecutes employees for genuinely expressing themselves, even on their own time.
Every benefit of transparency has potentially severe costs, and every cost of transparency has potentially enormous benefits. The best companies and organizations will know how to balance the two.
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