We’re Talking About People
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 by David Meerman ScottThis is a guest post from David Meerman Scott adapted from his new book World Wide Rave. His previous book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR was a number-one bestseller and is published in 24 languages.
This debate about social media in the enterprise is just so damn silly. It seems crazy to me to try to regulate technology in the workplace when the real harm (or benefit!) comes from the people using that technology. I’ve witnessed the same phenomena twice in the past two decades: when personal computers entered the workplace in the 1980s, and during the Web and email debates of the 1990s. If you were in the workforce at the time, you might recall when executives believed email would expose a corporation’s secrets, and therefore only “important employees” (often defined as director-level and above) were given computers and email addresses. Years later (beginning in 1994), companies fretted about employees freely using the public Internet and being exposed to “unverified information” that was not written by “real journalists.”
The solution has always been the same: Don’t provide employees with computers. Refuse to provide a company email address. Ban the Internet within the corporate firewalls. Block YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and forums from view. Yet how many companies today refuse to provide a computer to employees at work if it can help them do their job? How many don’t provide company email? How many ban Internet access completely? Virtually none. So why are companies falling into the same old foolish patterns?
My recommendations to organizations are simple: Have guidelines about what you can and cannot do at work. Hold employees to a measurable standard for performance on the job. But don’t try to ban a specific set of social media technologies. Your guidelines should include advice about how to communicate in any medium, including face-to-face conversation, presentations at events, email, social media, online forums and chat rooms, and other forms of communication. Rather than putting restrictions on social media (the technology), it’s better to focus on guiding the way people behave. The corporate guidelines could inform employees that they can’t reveal company secrets, they can’t use inside information to trade stock or influence prices, and they must be transparent and provide their real name and affiliation when communicating.
As long as your employees get their work done in a satisfactory manner, there should be no need to regulate their minute-to-minute behaviour. You don’t regulate how often people can use the restroom, when they can chat with a colleague in the hallway about their kids, or whether they use a mobile phone for company calls while taking a cigarette break, so why regulate when they can look at an online video? If you have individual cases of people not getting their jobs done in a satisfactory manner, deal with that problem as the “people issue” it really is. If it persists after several warnings, fire the employee, but make sure your expectations were clear from the start.
David Meerman Scott blogs at Web Ink Now
