Case Studies
The Monitoring of Social Media by
Employers
Monitoring and electronic surveillance of
employees in the workplace has a long and
complex history. Workers have always felt
uneasy about such intrusions but have had
little legal recourse. Disputes quickly arose
when companies began to systematically
monitor email accounts of their workers.
Workers objected, but several key court
decisions such as Smyth v. Pillsbury have
strongly affirmed a corporation’s legal right to
monitor virtually all of the digital activities of
their employees.
The debate about employee monitoring has
now shifted to social media. Social media
has generally been more popular for
personal matters rather than work-related
ones, but it has a growing presence in the
workplace. LinkedIn is a social network for
professionals and is a popular workplace
tool that provides an online contact book,
curriculum vitae, and publishing platform for
anyone in the labor market. Facebook is
trying to establish a presence in
corporations, but some companies ban
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Facebook because of its detrimental impact
on worker productivity.
However, monitoring a person’s personal
Facebook page has become routine for
some businesses. There is a wealth of
information on these pages that makes a
worker’s life and activities highly transparent.
Moreover, consultants predict that online
monitoring of social media by employers will
rise over the next decade. Their research
also shows that younger people are more
open to sharing their personal data with their
employers, with 36% of younger workers
saying they would be happy to do so.
Social media offers a tantalizing opportunity
for employers to gain some insight into the
personal lives and preferences of their
employees. It is also a way to detect
potential problems and weed out unattractive
job applicants. It is fairly common for
employers and head hunters to check out a
candidate’s background and qualifications
on social media. They are interested in
seeing what a person’s Facebook page
reveals about his or her skills, personality,
political leanings, recreational activities, and
so forth. Job candidates who have been
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indiscreet, who have posted inappropriate
photos, or sent provocative tweets may find
that good job opportunities are passing them
by.
Some human resources (HR) specialists and
consultants also contend that this monitoring
of social media should continue even after a
worker has been hired. Advocates of such
monitoring point to many examples of
employees posting inappropriate material,
such as private or confidential information.
Some hospital employees, for example,
have been discovered discussing the
sensitive details of a patient’s medical
history on their Facebook pages in direct
violation of HIPAA. Others cite examples of
how employees use Twitter or Facebook to
put the company they work for in a bad light
by making harmful and pejorative
statements, often full of hyperbole.
According to Nancy Flynn, “Strict monitoring
allows employers to spot potential problems
early [and] get the information offline as
quickly as possible.”
These consultants, therefore, argue that
companies should monitor the social media
sites of both their prospective and current
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employees. There are many benefits of such
monitoring both for employers and for
employees, such as a tradeoff of privacy for
the guarantee of greater job security. Other
HR professionals disagree with this policy,
even if the trend among younger workers is
to be more obliging. Cary Cooper,
distinguished professor of organizational
psychology and health at Lancaster
University, regards this monitoring as “a plain
case of trying to find out what employees are
doing and thinking—clearly an intrusion into
their private life. I see no HR justification for
it whatsoever.”
Questions
- Where do you stand on the issue of
social media monitoring by employers?
What should be the scope of such
monitoring? Do you agree with Mr.
Cooper’s claim that there is no
justification for this activity? - Do you agree with the research
suggesting this monitoring will intensify
in the future?
