Teneros Social Sentry is promising to help employers monitor their employees social media accounts with ease. Joshua Brustein of the New York Times says in Keeping a Closer Eye on Employees’ Social Networking:
It has always been possible, of course, for employers to look at what their workers are posting on social media. It is an increasingly common activity for human resources departments vetting prospective employees. But there was a measure of privacy afforded by the sheer amount of information online. Automating the process makes it more likely that monitoring will become commonplace, say both those who approve and those who disapprove.
Social Sentry draws only on publicly posted information on Facebook and Twitter; the company plans to add YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn by this summer. The company is marketing the product as a way to watch for the release of confidential or embarrassing information and to measure how much time employees are spending on social media during work hours.
Brustein also goes on to point out some of the potential problems:
Unlike corporate e-mail accounts, however, social networking isn’t clearly of the working world. While it is publicly accessible, many users see it as an informal and intimate form of communication. . .
Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a research and advocacy group, called the automatic monitoring of social networking a “disaster,” and predicted that it would lead to people being fired for online griping, the airing of political views and other innocuous conversation. There is a tendency to react to an off-color joke or complaint that appears online more harshly than to the same comment made in a cafeteria or company picnic.
But he also said that there is little recourse for those whose social networking activity gets them in trouble.
My advice? If you have to spy on your employees you need to fire them or you need to change the way you do business. If your boss needs to spy on you. . . there are deeper issues. No trust in the workplace will only gum up the works and slow everything down.
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