Who, What, Where, When, and How?
Many companies may be shy about monitoring employees, but the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act in the United States makes it clear that a company-provided computer system is the property of the employer. Employees should have no expectation of privacy when using the system to transmit e-mail, surf the Web, blog, text, or engage in any other form of electronic communication. In the Europe Union, the Data Protection Acts allow for employee monitoring, but the laws are more restrictive than the US laws. The Article 29 Working Party emphasizes preventing the misuse of company resources with means other than monitoring.
CareerBuilder found that 45 percent of employers review social media sites for job applicants. One search that doesn’t seem too obvious but can impact how you might view a potential employee is if you research a job applicant on Facebook and you see them posting items such as “I am not going to work tomorrow,” as shown in Figure 13-1. As a potential employer, you may suspect that the potential employee is going to call in sick and skip work, impacting your productivity level.
Figure 13-1 A Facebook post: “Not going to work tomorrow”
Once the employee is hired, companies are more willing to monitor their activity on the internal network with network data loss prevention tools. So “Who” will you monitor? Employees. You can only monitor externally for activity from customers, not what the customers actually do. As social media usage expands, companies will have more choices to expand their capabilities by utilizing new tools to track employee activity in the office.
“What” you monitor for will be different across companies and industries. Banking may be more concerned with financial advice and regulations. Healthcare is more concerned with patient information being shared. Retail may be more concerned about brand damage. With employees not fully educated about the potential consequences of their posts, you have to set up a variety of tools to capture the information you’re looking for and then narrow down the scope. Once you have implemented a training program, however, employees won’t have an excuse for breaking the rules.
In Chapter 2, we defined three categories of Utilization metrics: technology, intellectual property, and copyright. Table 13-1reiterates those categories. So to answer our “What” question, within each of these categories, once you identify the tools that best fit your needs (see Table 13-2 later in the chapter), you can now identify what data to search for.
Table 13-1 Utilization Categories
“Where” you monitor is limited. You obviously can’t monitor employees in their homes or when they are surfing from their mobile phones using their social media applications. Well, okay, theoretically, a company can put monitoring software in stealth mode to monitor a laptop at home, but that gets a company into more trouble than it’s probably worth. A company may then be violating employee privacy at home. For mobile phones such as the iPhone, apps for just about all the popular social media sites—LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook—can be installed and cannot really be monitored easily.
The “When” of monitoring is pretty much 24/7/365—all day, every day. The monitoring of job applicants before they are even hired has grown with social media. It is fairly easy to find prospective employees’ Facebook pages, LinkedIn accounts, Twitter feeds, and blog posts to see how they conduct themselves and how that may impact the company’s reputation. According to a survey by the recruitment agency MyJobGroup.co.uk,2 40 percent of UK employees admit to criticizing their employers on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Other interesting findings include:
2 Online Workplace Critics—UK Businesses Urged to Address Social Media HR Policies, MyJobGroup (May 21, 2010), http://www.myjobgroup.co.uk/media-centre/press-releases/online-workplace-critics-21052010.shtml.
20 percent of employees admit to “lambasting” their employers online
53 percent would support disciplinary action against fellow employees for online activity
60 percent of employees would change online posts if they were aware of their employer reading their posts
70 percent had no idea if their employer had a social media policy
To answer the question “How” will you accomplish the monitoring, you will evaluate your situation and assess which tools we’ve discussed will best meet your needs. One example of a tool is Spector360.com. This tool can show you what an employee is doing on the office computer. You can track his or her keystrokes and see exactly what he or she may be posting to social media sites. If the employee takes the laptop home and uses it for personal reasons, you can also track that usage. You may not want to do that if you are very concerned about privacy infringement. You need appropriate technology to accomplish your goals. You might need something as detailed as Specter360 or perhaps you can get by with public monitoring tools such as Google Alerts. What tools you select are specific to your company goals.