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?