How much time are your employees on Facebook?
Dallas City Hall revealed that a number of city employees were on Facebook a few too many hours during the workday:
- A City analyst had his Facebook account open for 68 hours during a three month period beginning in January.
- One racked up 198 hours in the same three month period.
- Others, including a code Inspector, office assistants, convention centers, a convention center group leader, a water utilities engineer, and a cultural affairs coordinator all had in excess of 100 hours.
- Employees together clocked in more than 3,000 hours on the site.
Now these numbers may be a little misleading because tracking the amount of time the actual user was logged in is not necessarily indicative of how long they were actually using the site. Needless to say, these results are not surprising. Take a walk around your office – odds are someone is on some social networking site.
The question for the employer becomes how to govern this use? In some cases, social networking may be encouraged for business reasons. Ultimately, the employer must have a clear social media policy in place that addresses what appropriate use is or is not – policy – policy – policy. This will vary from employer to employer.
It’s amazing what people will put in their emails, even after they have been warned by their lawyers. There have been a number of cases I have been involved in where an employer has been able to access emails from an employee’s web-based hotmail account that show he or she is actively violating a non-compete or even sending work to a competitor. The question is, can an employer access an employee’s web-based email?
