Blogging not in the job description

A Colleague sent me an article from The New York Times that comments on how businesses are struggling on how to deal with interns and new employees who expect to be able to blog about work.

My thoughts:

- There continues to be a huge disconnect between what employees and employers feel is appropriate to be posted on the Internet. Both sides are probably slightly off - Employers are overly cautious for issues of liability and protection of the brand and employees fail to understand that be belonging to an organization, their behavior on and off-the-clock can reflect on the company

- Too many companies still have not designed specific policies to address social media, creating an environment of confusion. My stance is that these policies are not important in terms of limiting behavior (the actual policy simply needs to be a form of "don't be stupid), rather having a policy is an effective way of educating employees about the issue and starting a discussion about the appropriate role of social media.

- Vaicom's confidentiality policy is idiotic. It states,  employees are "discouraged from publicly discussing work-related matters, whether constituting confidential information or not, outside of appropriate work channels, including online in chat rooms or 'blogs.' "

Discouraging employees from talking about ANYTHING related to work, means that the company is missing out on thousands of free amabassadors. This is both bad business, it is also unrealistic. They would be better served engaging employees about the vision and direction of the company and empowering them to share that with others.

- This issue is not going away. Companies can either treat it on a case-by-case basis, which to me seems rather ineffecient and begs discrimination issues, or they can choose to address the trend and examine ways they can use social media to better engage employees and improve organizational effectiveness

A question of identity

One comment in this article, by a manager at the Society for Human Resource management, made me pause: "young people do not see their job as their identity."

And why should they? Employees entering the marketplace today will likely hold several different jobs over their lifetime. Trust in leadership is at an all-time low and employees have little faith in long-term benefits.

We all have several identities. We are brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and grandchildren. We are friends and teammates and colleagues. We are authors and artists, athletes and actors. Some of us are even bloggers.

Life is mediated by the identities we adopt, some of which we choose and some of which are forced upon us the situations we find ourselves in, but all of which are defined by our interactions (yes, I was a Sociology major).

Social media allows individuals to choose the identity they want. It allows them to interact with individuals who support, challenge and shape them in ways they desire. This is not always a good thing, but it is far less threatening and restrictive than most social environments - particularly work.

Robert Scoble asked the question: Would you work for a company just because they let you blog? Well, the issue is not that simple, but companies that are overly restrictive and try to control and define employees will likely have trouble attracting talent as individuals grow entitled to a freedom and individuality that the traditional corporate world often doesn't fit.

This dependance on a rigidly defined, sigular workplace identity also limits a company's ability to innovate (see: Google's 20 percent time and the success of companies that pay for employees to go to school).

As the business climate becomes more dependant on that break-through idea, as we look less to producing more of what we have, and more toward creating what we dont, organizations need to re-think the "identities" they look for in employees.

They need to think less about asking employees to adopt a pre-defined identity they have for workers and more about how they can co-create an identity of an employee that makes sense for the individual and the organization.

Elizabeth Albrycht examines the issue of identity further.

---

Technorati Tags: identity, blogs, employees,

Comments

[markbnj]

But remember.

Us (remaining) baby boomers, who often, as in the SHRM article you quote above

DID think that our jobs WERE our life.

We got the job, the company appreciated our effectiveness, and got ahead based on that.

The problem is that life HAS changed, and some of us are STILL figuruing out how to adapt to this change.

(sayeth the currently unemployed techie from a large NJ corporation after 20+ years of service...)

sigh
markbnj

[David Phillips]

I think the Elizabeth Albrycht thin king is very important. If one imagines that there are two organisations. There is the one that is the 'Real organisation' and then there is the one that has been created on line which includes web sites, email, hyper links and other content created by the organisation. This is the 'Real organisation' on line. The online organisation is controlled by it but other Internet agencies are at play such as search engines, portals and, now much more social media. These elements mashup content from a range of sources and mix current and historical content.

No there is a new organisation. It is an Internet organisation. In a way, this is akin to the many 'selves' of the social sciences (and heavily re-enforced these days by the nuro-psychologists). It is the organisation most of us know because we know organisation from the Internet which is different to the 'Real organisation'.

Progressively, internal stakeholders see the Internet self and it begins to influence their perception of the 'Real organisation'. The Internet changes the organisation. It is unavoidable.

Organisations can resist this change or they can come to terms with it and embrace it.

Resistance will cause conflict because of the effects of dissonance – the two realities are in conflict.

Inevitably, the organisation has to embrace the influences of the Internet and they will change the way the organisation works.

This can be a concious corporate strategic decision or it can be ad hoc. If the latter, the organisation will, inevitably, be disintermediated as stakeholders take out of the organisation the values that they can adopt.

Embracing social media is not easy but is a necessity for all organisations.

I think that wiki's are the key but blogs and interactive content driven by RSS are currently the inevitable technologies of the moment.

[Jeffrey Treem]

David,

Thanks for the comments I think that you are right on in how the increase in information (what has become termed "transparency," whether voluntary or not) has shifted the ways employees view organizations.

I also think your point about dissonance is right on. This is a problem not only for organizations themselves, but for employees that are struggling to reinvent the ways they work.

One of the overlooked aspects of social media implementation is that its benifits are strongly correlated with the level of adoption.

Lastly, I think you make a key point that in the absence of corporate recognition of this shift, employees will take it upon themselves to define their role and mission. After all, we all need an identity and if the organization does not find a way to support that development, then behaviors will more and more be out of line with "corporate" objectives.

Thanks for the thoughts,
Jeffrey