Use of social media has surged in recent years but when the line between your employee’s professional and personal lives becomes blurred this can cause issues. Inappropriate use of social media by your staff has potentially serious legal and reputational ramifications to your business, whether this be making derogatory comments about your business, posting offensive content that could be linked back to you, harassing customers or colleagues, or divulging company sensitive information the risks are there.
It is therefore crucial for employers to have a robust social media policy in place to set out the behaviour expected of employees online. In particular, we recommend including the following in any social media policy as applicable:
-Expected best practice / guidelines for staff posting on business social media as part of their role;
- If employees link their personal social media profiles to your business, request that their profile or posting states somewhere that their views are their own and do not represent those of the business;
-Set clear guidelines about whether accessing personal social media accounts is allowed / not allowed during working hours;
-If employees want to earn additional income via social media (“side hustles”) consider what, if any, limitations you want and can place on this. Will they need the company’s permission first and be required to provide full details if requested? In this instance we also strongly recommend including mirroring wording in employment contracts;
-Whether the business is content for employees to add clients / business contacts on personal or professional social media accounts and whether such details need to be deleted when an individual’s employment ends;
-Information about what monitoring the business may undertake, who may undertake this, and how the results of such may be used, making sure any monitoring is kept within legal limits; and
-Include reference to any supporting business policies such as your Data Protection Policy, Anti-Bullying / Harassment Policy or Confidentiality Policy.
- As with any policy it is important to draw such to the attention of all employees, review the policy regularly (ideally at least annually) and ensure it is enforced consistently.