Case Study: The Monitoring of Social Media by Employers
Monitoring and electronic surveillance of employees in the workplace has a long and complex history. Workers have always felt uneasy about such intrusions but have had little legal recourse. Disputes quickly arose when companies began to systematically monitor email accounts of their workers. Workers objected, but several key court decisions such as Smyth v. Pillsbury have strongly affirmed a corporation’s legal right to monitor virtually all of the digital activities of their employees.
The debate about employee monitoring has now shifted to social media. Social media has generally been more popular for personal matters rather than work-related ones, but it has a growing presence in the workplace. LinkedIn is a social network for professionals and is a popular workplace tool that provides an online contact book, curriculum vitae, and publishing platform for anyone in the labor market. Facebook is trying to establish a presence in corporations, but some companies ban Facebook because of its detrimental impact on worker productivity.
However, monitoring a person’s personal Facebook page has become routine for some businesses. There is a wealth of information on these pages that makes a worker’s life and activities highly transparent. Moreover, consultants predict that online monitoring of social media by employers will rise over the next decade. Their research also shows that younger people are more open to sharing their personal data with their employers, with 36% of younger workers saying they would be happy to do so.
Social media offers a tantalizing opportunity for employers to gain some insight into the personal lives and preferences of their employees. It is also a way to detect potential problems and weed out unattractive job applicants. It is fairly common for employers and head hunters to check out a candidate’s background and qualifications on social media. They are interested in seeing what a person’s Facebook page reveals about his or her skills, personality, political leanings, recreational activities, and so forth. Job candidates who have been indiscreet, who have posted inappropriate photos, or sent provocative tweets may find that good job opportunities are passing them by.
Some human resources (HR) specialists and consultants also contend that this monitoring of social media should continue even after a worker has been hired. Advocates of such monitoring point to many examples of employees posting inappropriate material, such as private or confidential information. Some hospital employees, for example, have been discovered discussing the sensitive details of a patient’s medical history on their Facebook pages in direct violation of HIPAA. Others cite examples of how employees use Twitter or Facebook to put the company they work for in a bad light by making harmful and pejorative statements, often full of hyperbole. According to Nancy Flynn, “Strict monitoring allows employers to spot potential problems early [and] get the information offline as quickly as possible.”
These consultants, therefore, argue that companies should monitor the social media sites of both their prospective and current employees. There are many benefits of such monitoring both for employers and for employees, such as a tradeoff of privacy for the guarantee of greater job security. Other HR professionals disagree with this policy, even if the trend among younger workers is to be more obliging. Cary Cooper, distinguished professor of organizational psychology and health at Lancaster University, regards this monitoring as “a plain case of trying to find out what employees are doing and thinking—clearly an intrusion into their private life. I see no HR justification for it whatsoever.
Questions:
What is your opinion on employers monitoring your social media behavior? is this ethical? Why? Why not? What are your thoughts about privacy and legal implications when employers monitoring your live outside work? Does the US goverment needs be more active in addressing this issue as employers move to have more control over the employee lifes for security purposes? Why? Why not?
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