Social Media & Work: Working Hard or Hardly Working?

For as long as I have been using social media my Mother has been drilling into me the importance of social media with regards to my career and working life.  She floated anecdotes of employees being reprimanded, even fired, for over use of the internet in general, not to mention those employees who found themselves caught out for using social media inside and outside of work. The argument over social media and its place in the employment world has been waging for as long as the relationship between employees and social media has existed.

Facebook has over 800 million users worldwide it is reasonable to assume, given the demographics of social media users that a lot of these people are in the 18-29 age group, and are either working or looking for work. Much of the conversation regarding the use of social media and employees was focused on the impact all the Facebooking was having on productivity. In 2007 a study estimated that the time spent by workers on Facebook and it’s ilk, was costing businesses over £130m a day, a similar study was conducted in 2009 that estimated the loss to business as a result of employees using social media was £1.4bn. Firewalls were erected, employees were reprimanded for over use of social media and Facebook was solely confined to something you used at home to interact with friends.

If Facebook was being used for your actual social interaction, what was happening to your business interactions? LinkedIn, a social media for professionals, launched in 2003 (two years before Facebook opened itself to be used internationally). On LinkedIn you could connect with friends, old and new, under the banner of networking, you could follow companies, apply to jobs, upload your CV and accept job offers and network with CEO’s all from your living room, or desk. It added a new layer to how we use social media, and for the first time acknowledged that how we behaved, as users on certain sites, would not be the way we behaved on professional sites. Take my own friends; one, an ardent follower of the various cat picture reddits, called D and the other, known for her annoying habit of using text speak online, called A. On D’s Facebook you are subjected to meme after meme after meme, on his LinkedIn it’s nothing but insightful articles of how employees can work better in teams, how the financial crisis isn’t really the banking sectors fault (guess what field he’s in I dare you?), not a meme in sight. Similarly, A’s Facebook is a mash of ‘Wud lv 2 c u ltr’ and neon pink pictures with superimposed text like ‘He loved her more the less makeup she wore’, yet her LinkedIn account reads like its’ been written by an English graduate, not that that says much given the atrocious level of grammar and spelling on this English graduates blog, but it was certainly different to her private self.  The likes of LinkedIn changed employers relationship to social media, it’s no longer advantageous to ban employees from using all social media, especially when companies are using it themselves to attract clients, or new employees or investors.

As of 2012 confusion reigns in the business world as there is no format for how companies deal with social media. Some have relaxed previous bans on staff use, believing that if employees are given access to social media they will police themselves, a sort of honor code, but for Facebook. Some companies give employees a percentage of their workday to use for their own benefit, and naturally a lot of that benefit is taken up in Facebook credits. Yet, still some companies prefer to block out social media entirely, along with the rest of the Internet, to ensure employees remain focused on their work. This model is failing though, with the advent of smartphones the internet has become more accessible and now instead of trying to get around the company firewall employees are surreptitiously checking Facebook and Twitter under the table on their mobile phones.

Companies have realized by now that employees will not stop using social networking, even if they do reduce the actual amount of access on their work pcs, they will continue to check it at home, on the train/bus, in the canteen and if anything their productivity will reduce more due to the constant effort to try and get around the roadblocks companies put up to prevent it. So companies started accepting that we use Facebook, which may have had worse consequences for employees than simply denying the need for social media. This change started, for me at any rate, with the anecdotal evidence of people phoning in sick to work only to be pulled into the bosses office the next day and made look at their Facebook status for the previous day which instead of saying ‘Think I might die from flu’ says ‘OMG best day ever at the beach, hahahaha suckers.’ Needless to say these people are promptly shown the door. Now, I’m not going to pretend I’ve never thrown a sickie, or played up an illness to have an extra day at the weekend, but COME ON! If you post your nefarious activities online, I’m sorry but you deserve to be fired.

Little by little though privacy began to change and suddenly we weren’t just escaping exes, spam bots or advertisers, we were blocking our employers, making our pages so private that all you see is a landscape photo and the user name. We were closing ourselves off from potential and current employers, knowing that somewhere, no matter how far in the past, there was something we said or did that made us unemployable, and we’d be damned if they thought they were going to get our help in firing us! Now we live in world where every time we are looking for jobs we sanitize our Facebook page, ensure maximum privacy at all times, and do a Google search on our names just before an interview, to make sure that it returns nothing but embarrassing articles about winning merit awards in schools or some other nonsense you’re more then happy for potential employers to see.

Employers though, became wise to this cleaned up version employees were presenting, they knew, buried somewhere deep in those tagged pictures was a reason you wouldn’t get the job, only problem was they couldn’t access your page. A couple of months ago, the Internet was abuzz with the stories that employers were now routinely asking their potential and current employees for their Facebook passwords. Forget for a second that it’s a violation of Facebook’s TOS (not that you read them anyway) to hand out your password, the idea that an employer would have that level access not only to you, but to anyone who was stupid enough to be friends with you. Yet, for potential employees who refuse to give their Facebook passwords to future employers, it appears that such unwillingness to share personal information could be a roadblock to gaining employment.  Mashable (a sort of HuffPo but for social media) has an interesting article looking at how best to respond to employers asking for your Facebook login. The most interesting feature of the article for me is the line 'You represent your company, so keep your personal social networking about you and not about work.' This is what companies are afraid of, they're worried that you are badmouthing your company, sharing private customer information or treating them as fools as you phone in sick and brag about it. The last thing any company wants is your comments to go viral and cause the viral results to be returned when a potential customer or investor Google's the company.

Take the recent example here in Ireland of Vodafone. An employee posted a picture that s/he took in work that day, the photo available here (along with a rival companies own version) went viral after being picked up on twitter. The employee posted a picture of a conversation between them and another employee, abusing the customer (although not to her face). In the original picture the customer's face wasn't blurred, and the shop is easily identifiable by the view. Vodafone instantly jumped on top of the issue and suspended two employees pending an investigation. What followed was multiple discussions online between two types of people; Customer Service and Customers. Those who had worked or do work in customer service defended the actions of the employees, calling for anyone who had never given our about a customer behind their back to raise their hands, there were no takers. Then the customers, who were calling for heads to roll and fearing that they were being abused secretly by these customer service types.

Both were right and wrong. I worked in customer service, and not a day went by where a customer didn't get under my skin, it's a very hard job, and there is the need to blow off steam with coworkers (especially as saying it directly to the customer will get you fired) but that's where my sympathy ends. Like the earlier example of people who post on Facebook while pretending to be sick, I felt that these Vodafone staff members were too stupid to go unpunished. While there may have been no malice in it, and no one but the customer and the staff knows what went on directly before the picture was taken, but the fact of the matter is that they uploaded it ON THE INTERNET! Fools. Honestly. This is why employers want access to Facebook, but is this why they're not getting the access? I have always been very wary of posting up comments about work, when I worked in customer service the urge to display the level of stupidity shown by some customers, online was almost overwhelming, yet all I could think of was, 'What if someone sees this?' My Facebook profile is private, nothing I put up there can be seen by anyone I don't want to, but I acknowledged that it's in the public domain, and if I acknowledged that anything I put up online instantly becomes less mine than the internet's then how can I resist a company's attempt to look at something I don't consider private? I suppose I can't.


Leaving that aside I want to turn to an interesting example of these attempts at companies gaining access to private social networks. My better half (or so he says) has no Facebook. I'll pause here to let you understand that there are people in this world that don't have Facebook. Have you accepted it? No? Neither have I, and we've been together five years. I digress, when my better half (and his colleagues) were approached by their employer (or former employer in my better half's case) looking for details of their Facebook. Now, I'm sketchy on the details, but I don't think they were looking for login information, just links to their profiles. Some of the workers were adamant they would not submit such information, my better half had no interest in fighting the good fight and simply went to his HR manager and explained that he didn't have Facebook. Remember the consternation you felt when I told you that reader? Now, try and imagine you write my better half's paycheck. Needless to say they didn't believe him, they assumed he was lying and he went to great lengths to assure them that he didn't have one. They wanted him to create one, something to do with the potential for networking with other global company offices. He refused, giving (I'm sure) a speech about social networks and privacy that I have heard hundreds of times before, and it was dropped. It points to another facet of this conversation though, if employers are asking for Facebook logins and my better half goes for a job interview, do you think they will believe him when he says I don't have one? Probably not, even if they do, it's seen as a bit weird. Social media judgement has two faces for employees and their employers, damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you have one, you can be asked to provide information. If you don't have one, they will presume you do and that you're lying. If they accept you don't have one, it's still a bit weird. Can't win.

I fail to understand what exactly is to be gained from having access to employees Facebook. If we assume that by and large social media has evolved to the point that people are not stupid enough to endanger their professional lives with badmouthing the company. Isn't the question for login redundant then? Sure, the only way an employer ever truly know if the Facebook profile they see is the ‘complete’ one, or if it’s a heavily cleaned up version of the candidate. Surely though, this is exactly the person we put across in interviews, and yet that person gets the job. Ask yourself what your answer to ‘What is your biggest weakness?’ in a) A job interview and b) The bar with your friends. For me answer a) is ‘I’m too much of a perfectionist’ and b) is ‘Every time I hear a Cindi Lauper song I will immediately start belting it out no matter where I am or who I’m with.’ Unless I’m applying to be Cindi’s assistant, then that answer is not getting me the job. The idea of being honest with your employer is ridiculous, no employee has ever been fully honest with their potential or current employer and if you were then you got hired despite your honestly not because of your honesty.  Asking employees for their Facebook passwords is just removing the veil that exists between businesses you and personal you, a veil that has been keeping employees employed since the interview was invented. No one wants you to be the real you when you’re being the professional you, no one wants to see you do fifty shots of Jaeger at the company picnic, even if that is what you do on an ordinary weekend.

At the end of the day, there has always been a divide between our professional selves and our private selves. We have always held back portions of ourselves, be it because they're likely to get us in trouble, or just simply so you can segregate the work you from the home you. What's wrong with that? Nothing. Social media is just another facet of the double life most workers lead. By attempting to remove the veil that exists between professional and private, companies are not just throwing back the curtain and revealing Oz, their demanding Oz reveal the crying mess that is the personal Oz, as opposed to the all powerful, professional one.