Group items tagged

notifying employees of clear rules on what is acceptable and what is not, balancing the need to monitor with the employees' reasonable expectations of privacy and weighing the overall benefits of allowing personal usage against the risks of doing so, are all issues with which managers will be familiar.

For employers, the temptation to utilise sites such as Facebook and MySpace may also lead them into trouble. Some employers view the scanning of such sites for information on prospective employees as legitimate; others view it as distasteful and intrusive (the equivalent of rummaging through a candidate's personal items). Whatever the view, employers adopting this approach would do well to heed the warning of the TUC's guidance on online social networking. This guidance reminds employers that only a minority of potential staff will have a public profile on a social network, so using information from this source can give either an unfair advantage or disadvantage to certain candidates, as well as leaving the employer open to the accusation of discrimination.

Employers have had to grapple with the issues raised by employee use of the Internet for some years and the rise of online social networking presents another challenge. There is no obvious conclusion here; employers will have to do what they consider to be correct in the light of their business concerns, their employee relations and their business culture. The dilemma posed by the heightened risks surrounding online social networking, whether to trust or restrict employees, does not lead to one "right" answer, but there is certainly a "wrong" answer. Given the ever-growing popularity of such sites and the potential consequences for employers of employee misuse, simply ignoring the issue can only lead to problems for the unwary employer.