Employee Blogging Risks
An uprising of employees indulging in blogging that goes against the interests of their own organization doesn’t bode well for the future, and there seems to be an urgent need to stem this rot. In the larger perspective, a vital question that needs to be addressed is whether employees should anymore be allowed to don the role of blogger at all?
What employees must do in the first place is a thorough soul-searching before getting into such nefarious acts that do no good to anyone but serious harm to the reputation of their company that has been earned the hard way. Blogging can be for fun, but not at the cost of compromising their organizational interests. Picking up informal bites from here and there, and stitch them together to make interesting reading is not blogging any way. What totally deviates from facts, and challenges the decorum of a firm and the principles of risk management cannot be termed as blogs.
Rumors spread faster than the forest fire through the internet. Such infamous reports can always be swept by leading search engines to other directions and a cunning reporter will only be too pleased to prepare a headline out of nothing. Remember, ‘ordinary’ journalists are never in the habit of cross-checking facts, and for them anything and everything that is half cooked is worth publishing. The real sufferers, therefore, are none other than the bosses who feed these employees with great care. The irony is that even the top brass of the company comes to know about the dirty designs only through the media, and in the process made to suffer a severe loss of face in the eyes of the public for no fault of theirs.
No doubt, such meaningless and misdemeanor acts by the employees intended to malign the image of their company need to be condemned in a strong and single voice, in addition to being dealt with an iron hand. After all, malicious campaigns cannot be permitted to gain public attention in the guise of blog writing. Mere termination from service looks insufficient and the guilty must be made to pay a much heavier price, including a jail term, so that such instances go a long way to open the half-closed eyes of the other anti-company employees who must be made to realize what ideal risk management is all about.
Of late, a large number of organizations have given their employees the liberty to participate in free and fair discussions on a mutually agreed platform on various topics pertaining to the company, but restricting themselves very much within the four walls of the organization. There is no need for the employees to engage in mud-slinging against their employers when they’re quite aware that company house journals are not meant for sale, and employees themselves are no investigative journalists.
On their part, employers must evolve a legitimate blog policy and new risk management standards that will clearly define the limitations of the employee besides initiating fresh moves to educate the workforce on the dangers of indulging in yellow-blogging, a term comparable to yellow journalism. It will only be a prudent step to subject all blogs to thorough scanning so that those found out of text can be straight away dumped into the dust bin.
Without mincing words, employees must be warned of the likely consequences, including legal, in case they fail to adhere to the company’s code of conduct. Those found to be violating the company tenets must be shown the door, and efforts must also be taken to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.
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Tags: Blogger, Blogging, Risk Management