Social Media in the Workplace

Introduction

“Employers should be able to monitor and discipline an employee for disparaging, work-related comments that the employee posts publicly on social media websites during working or non-working hours in order to prevent harassment of other employees, avoid legal exposure, and limit the effects of disloyal behavior.”

Social Media

Social Media is the new rage in the modern world. It has taken over the world like an epidemic and now there is hardly a person who owns a computer and internet connection but doesn't have an online identity on a social platform. Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, hi5, Linkedin, Myspace, etc are only some of the total media platforms that are available for use. People use these platforms to interact with their social contacts like friends, families and even use them to broaden their social circles. Businesses are also showing a keen interest in social media as it presents itself to be a perfect way of reaching their target market perfectly and accurately (Sunshine, 2011). Mark Zuckerberg the owner of Facebook is earning millions of dollars worth of revenue everyday because of this particular reason.

Specific Social Media Issues

However, in a workplace or an office environment social media has become a nuisance.

Employees instead of working at their office times are observed to waste their time engaged in socialization with their social circles. Constant communication is maintained online which consumes all their time or distracts the employees and prevents them from working with 100% efficiency on their office tasks (Quirke, 2012, pp. 60-66).

Another problem which the social media presents is that employees are freely venting their negative and often biased comments on such a public platform which can be viewed by countless numbers of individuals at the same time, which is becoming a serious blow to the creditability and reputation of the organizations. There is no organization in the world which can boast 100% satisfaction from its employees. Strives, conflicts and arguments make up the daily routine of any individual in all aspects of his/her life. But when all such small conflicts are made public it serves to discredit the people involved. Organizations cannot take such negative publicity. Since the employees are putting up a biased view of the organization in their personal posts, it is only serving to discredit the organization name. The audience who is viewing the posts does not know any other fact than the biased viewpoint (Frauenheim, 2009, pp. 4).

Secondly this is also very easy way for any employee to commit espionage and data leakage in an organization. Any sensitive material can be instantly made public regarding the organization which can be used against it by its competitors (Lieber, 2011, pp. 101).

These are just some of the reasons which merit constant vigilance from the employers on their employee's social accounts. They need make sure that their employees are not posting an disparaging or negative comments about their organization during both their working and non-working hours (Maiolo, 2012, S-1-S-4). Similarly, there can be cases of harassment by one employee ...