Policy Management

The policies developed by Human Resources set the boundaries for what is acceptable for employees to do. An IT security policy may be written by the IT department, but HR and Legal must still sign off to authorize the policy. A social media policy may be written by Marketing, the Community Manager, and IT, but HR still has to approve it. And social media policies need to be updated more frequently as the landscape changes so quickly.

HR also needs to create a separate public-facing policy, as we discussed in Chapter 6. The public policy is a basic summary of what the detailed internal policy states about social media usage. The key concepts in the public policy should include the following:

Define the limitations on what the company is allowed to do.

Provide transparency in all the company’s social media activities.

Define the responsibilities of employees.

Show how the company develops relationships with customers.

The public policy should be simply communicated and friendly in tone.

As the landscape evolves, HR has to be responsible for monitoring changes in how employees use social media with assistance from IT that provides the necessary tools to monitor employee activities. Once that activity has been analyzed, HR must then update policies to reflect the necessary changes. There is a lot of work involved in monitoring and reporting on any kind of activity within a company. In the past, this has been pushed off onto the IT department. With social media, so much of the information is confidential that the information posted can lead to lawsuits. The issue is in such a gray area that IT needs the guidance of HR and Legal for this monitoring to occur. Remember, however, completely trying to restrict or ban social media in the workplace will most likely not work.