Any brand or commercial organisation should by now be monitoring any mention of itself on Twitter, Facebook and any up coming social media. There is old adage that if a customer liked your product or service they would tell five people and if they disliked it they’d tell twenty five. Today that might easily translate into five thousand and twenty five thousand respectively. Neglect social media and you could very easily be in trouble.
But what about employees? If your marketing people are already “looking out” for your organisation they should also report employees’ comments. These are public media; monitoring is legitimate. And if no-one is looking out for you are you going to depend on chance?
The next question, of course, is what to do if adverse comment, confidential disclosures or inappropriate behaviour comes to light. Tribunals are increasingly supportive of employers who take relevant action, but a critical point is procedure. Without following your procedure sorting out what a Tribunal might support and what it might reject is going to be, at best, problematic.
Any procedure will throw up questions about policy very quickly. What was required or expected of the employee? Did they know about those expectations? Were the expectations clear and did they cover the behaviour in question? Did the employee realise what sanctions might be applied?
Read more on our blog about social networking and the care sector
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