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What Should We Do About an Employee's Outrageous Blog?
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Dear Rita,
An employee googled our nonprofit's name and came across a coworker's blog. The blog contains some outrageous material, including some unflattering comments about working at our organization. What can our nonprofit do?
-- Blog-Burned
Dear Blog-Burned:
It seems like just 10 years ago most workplace gossip was confined to clandestine meetings in the break room. Once uttered, it vanished like the last donut. Not so today. Now the blogosphere captures those rants and raves for all to read in perpetuity.
The best way to deal with a problem like this is to prevent or discourage it by establishing a blogging policy for all employees.The second best course of action may be to ignore the blog. But if there is some detriment to your agency, ask the employee to remove the offending material -- after confirming the blog is not legally protected speech. If the content is discriminatory or harassing, treat the blog as workplace conduct and initiate appropriate remedial action. A New Jersey court held that Continental Airlines had a duty to stop the harassment of a female pilot contained on a coworker's personal blog. Lastly, determine if any discipline is appropriate given the content of the speech and the employee's response to your request to take the content off the blog.
To evaluate what can be done to stop the unflattering blogging you must consider the content of the speech and the law of your state.
Employee blogging could be deemed protected speech under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or whistleblower laws. The NLRA allows employees to discuss the terms and conditions of employment with the purpose of engaging in collective action to change them. Whistleblower laws in some states protect employees from retaliation if they report illegal or unethical behavior to government officials or agency management.
Additionally, some states have laws prohibiting an employer from disciplining an employee for participating in "legal recreational activities outside of work hours" unless that activity creates "a material conflict of interest related to the employer's business interest." While many of these state laws have yet to be used to protect the right to blog, they could be applied here. To determine what law is applicable in your state look to your local chamber of commerce or nonprofit association for state employment laws concerning "privacy" or "off duty conduct."
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Comments
We have a good, albeit new policy at my company that addresses blogging, but given the relative newness of this Internet feature, companies will be revising their blogging policies often in the near future. But the operative word here is policy. Organizations should definitely have a blogging policy. At a minimum it should prohibit derogatory comments that could be damaging to the organization’s name and reputation, and it definitely MUST protect the confidentiality of the organization’s data, its trademarks and copyrights, its customers, contractors and vendors, and the privacy of fellow employees. And almost without saying, in today’s world of heightened security awareness, comments about an organization’s facilities and security should never be posted.
While you cannot block employees’ freedom of speech by preventing them from posting harmless comments on blogs (such as we are doing in this hopefully innocent chronicle), you should mandate that such comments never be made from the organization’s computers. Computers themselves leave dusty trails of IP addresses and other forms of identification, and company computers should be used primarily for work, save for an occasional personal web click here or there.
I also echo comments posted above about the imprudence of certain blogging. Recently I was asked to speak on this topic and I refer Blue Avocado readers to a short article I penned on Ezine on the seriousness of today’s Internet use. Parents – speak to your teenagers. Inappropriate blogging habits today could ruin job opportunities tomorrow.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Changing-Jobs---Internet-Imprudence-Can-Ruin-Y...
Our organization has an agreement that is signed by each new employee. The document acknowledges the employee's rights to conduct their life outside work as they see fit, but also the employee's agreement that they will not engage in activity that would put the organization in a bad light or be detrimental to the organization in any way and further states that employees agree to conduct themselves in a professional manner when attending any functions on behalf of the organization... Bashing your company in a blog would be in contravention of any such agreement I think.
I believe any thinking current employer would see red flags if it was evident that his employee's former employees were fair game on blogs.
While I think a blogging policy is a good idea, I would be reluctant to tell a person they can't blog, which some corporations have tried.
A blogger would be smart to either not write about work issues, or at least have the good sense to do it anonymously. Nadine Habosh found that out the hard way when she was fired from her job in the NY fashion industry because she blogged about her work.
When I started my Laughing Stalk blog a few years ago, and even when I started my humor writing venture 14 years ago, I made it a rule to never blog or write about my employer.
Former employers are a completely different matter though.
Erik Deckers
Indianapolis, IN
In addition to the above excellent comments, I would want to evaluate the validity of the comments made on the blog. Perhaps this unfortunate way of expressing dissatisfaction is masking the existence of a real problem. A conversation with the employee about the underlying content could lead to solving some real problems in the organization and an employee who feels more valued.
Jackie
http://womendrummers.org
It seems that the emphasis, rather than being placed on the medium of communication, should be placed on the content of the message and the reasons for it. Evaluating the employee's performance, discussing his goals, and reaching an understanding about the source of the frustration are all much better avenues to pursue than trying to figure out whether you're squashing someone's right to express themselves. In the best-case scenario, you can reach accord with your staffer, and he might take the offending posts down all on his own, or better still, blog about how much his organization and manager care about his well-being.
I suggest that somebody should point out to the disgruntled employee that her/his statements on the blog will likely hurt her/him more than it hurts the organization. For example, if that person were to look for a job someplace else, that critical blog could be found by the prospective employer. Who is going to want to hire a whiney, critcal, complainer?A few years ago I interviewed a man to hire from another department in the same company. He seemed to have the job prerequisites and good references. His performance appraisals from his current job were "pretty good" (not stellar, but above average) However, his personnel file contained a letter written by him as a comment to his last performance appraisal. His letter attacked his boss for favoritism and he attacked his peers for incompetence and laziness. If he had not written that letter I probably would have hired him, but I certainly didn't want somebody with that attitude on my team.