Ensure employees use ‘tool’ appropriately, as with phone or email
Social media is a communication medium organizations can no longer afford to ignore and the best way employers can protect themselves from improper use of these tools is to create guidelines, not ban them, according to the head of the British Columbia Public Service.
In September, Allan Seckel announced the provincial government was creating social media guidelines for employees, leading critics to proclaim public servants would be wasting their time, and taxpayers’ money, looking at their friends’ photos on Facebook or watching videos on YouTube.
“We’re not creating a facility so someone can come to work and hang out on Facebook all day and get paid out of the public purse,” said Seckel.
“You have to approach this on the basis that you trust your employees to do the right thing. We will hold people accountable who are doing things that are silly with these tools, just like we would hold people accountable that do things inappropriately on the Internet or send out inappropriate emails or do anything inappropriate in the workplace. It’s not a free-for-all.”
B.C.’s social media guidelines will include information on how to use social media and what kind of content would be harmful or inappropriate, said Seckel.
“If you wouldn’t say something out loud in a crowd, you probably wouldn’t want to say it on Twitter either,” he said.
While employees will be able to access social media for personal reasons, just as they have access to email and the Internet, the guidelines will also ensure employees know how to make the best use of social media for professional purposes, said Seckel.
“It allows for two-way communication in ways that previous tools couldn’t and in a way that is actually fairly cost-effective,” he said.
The government has already set up several blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and YouTube channels to communicate with the public.
One of the blogs, Living Water Smart, provides updated information about the province’s water plan and allows the public to comment on the province’s new water act, said Seckel.
One of the Facebook pages provided information about the H1N1 flu virus last flu season. On Facebook and Twitter, the wildfire management branch of the B.C. Ministry of Forests and Range provides up-to-date information on wildfires in the province and allows the public to provide their own updates.
Other Twitter accounts provide information on floods in the province as well as employment opportunities in the public service.
The BC Public Service’s YouTube channel has videos highlighting various careers in the public service, including interviews with employees, to encourage people to consider applying for a job with the government.
“There’s a range of things we can do,” said Seckel.
The guidelines will give public servants the ability to use these tools, when appropriate, just like they would use the phone or email for work purposes, he said.
“We’re just adding to the arsenal of tools and giving some expectations of how they can be used.”
Evolution of communication
Social media is the evolution of communication and can be used internally to improve communication among employees as well as externally to enhance communication between employees and customers, said Carolyn Ray, vice-president of employee engagement at National Public Relations in Toronto.
“Social media is really one of the ways to facilitate communication within companies and help improve things like innovation and collaboration,” said Ray.
Organizations can use social media to find out about employees’ concerns and address them before they become big issues, she said. However, for this to work, people in the organization have to be actively using these social media tools and responding to concerns quickly, she said.
Social media guidelines should help employees use these tools by providing information about the technical aspects of social media, as well as social media dos and don’ts, said Ray.
“That doesn’t have to be particularly complex because the same rules apply to social media as they do to any form of communication in terms of confidential information and things like that,” she said.
In developing guidelines, organizations should involve legal, information technology, human resources and communications departments. Organizations can also look to social media trailblazers to learn from best practices, said Ray.
IBM a trailblazer
For example, IBM posted its employee-created social media guidelines online. The computer giant encourages other organizations to read these guidelines and incorporate those practices that work for them, said Carrie Bendzsa, a spokesperson at IBM Canada.
IBM’s guidelines include informing employees they are personally responsible for the content they publish online and that content will be public for a long time. They also state employees must post a disclaimer stating they are speaking on their own behalf, not IBM’s, if they publish content relevant to IBM products or services in a personal manner.
The guidelines also remind employees not to post confidential or proprietary information, either that of IBM or another company, and to obtain approval from clients, partners or suppliers before citing them online.
Employees are also told to respect their audience and not use any slurs or engage in conduct that wouldn’t be acceptable in IBM’s workplace.
While social media might not be right for every organization or every group of employees, simply blocking the use of social media at work isn’t the answer, said Ray.
“When you block things like Facebook or you don’t let people use Twitter or engage in blogs, that has an impact on engagement. You don’t feel trusted,” she said.
