Employers Protect Yourselves from Harmful Blogging
Juliana M. Snelling · February 1st, 2006
The use of web logs or ‘blogs’, is growing in leaps and bounds. According to the latest survey by the Employment Law Alliance - of which Mello Jones & Martin, Bermuda is a member - perhaps as many as 5% of the American workforce maintain these on-line personal diaries.
Anybody surfing the internet can read a blog and, if invited, leave their own comments for others to read. Some bloggers use these ‘electronic soapboxes’ to vent against their employers and colleagues at work. The survey revealed that 16% of blog users admitted to having posted negative or critical comments regarding their employer, supervisors, co-workers or clients. From this data one can infer that in a company with 120 employees, its likely that there is one employee posting something negative about the company or its employees.
This type of blogging can have a dangerous impact on employer companies as well as negatively affect morale in the work place. Employees have been fired over the issue – indeed, the practice of firing a worker for what is deemed inappropriate blogging has its own name, “doocing” (named for a fired worker who maintains the www.dooce.com blog).
Despite this potential harm, the survey found that only about 15% of employers have specific policies addressing work-related blogging which is perhaps not surprising given the complex freedom of expression arguments that anti-blogging regulations raise.
Employers should not, however, be deterred from taking action to protect themselves from harmful bloggers. Today’s leading employers need to add blogging policies to employee handbooks just as they did for internet and personal e-mail use years ago. Negative blogging about an employer in any community could provide serious harm to an employer but in a small, tightly knit community like Bermuda where ‘everybody knows everybody’, such harm can be greatly amplified.
Whilst employers can’t stop their employees from blogging in their personal time, they can take action to restrict its content and they can certainly prohibit or restrict blogging activity during work hours.
Interestingly, the survey found that 62% of employers in America who have blogging policies prohibit any employer related information being posted on a blog (whether good or bad). Employees appear to be quite sympathetic with such policies. 60% of employees polled agreed that employers should have the right to discipline or terminate employees who post confidential or damaging or embarrassing information about their employer on their personal blog.
Ms. Snelling advises employers that a sensible blogging policy should:
- insist that employees who do blog include a disclaimer in a prominent place on the blog that the employee’s views do not reflect the views of the his employer;
- make clear that the employee takes sole responsibility for the contents of his blog vis a vis third parties and holds the employer harmless in respect of same;
- tie in with, and reflect, established internet and email policies;
- refer to and reinforce the employee’s duty to keep confidential and employer proprietary matters to themselves;
- include a term that the employee may not disparage the company or post inappropriate information or content such as would potentially discredit either the employer or its employees (including the employee blogging);
- make it clear that violation of the policy may well result in disciplinary action up to and including summary dismissal.