Banning Facebook An Over-Reaction

The UK’s Facebook users are 3.5 million accidents waiting to happen, warns the TUC in new advice published today (Thursday) for both employers and their staff.

In guidance available on workSMART, its working life website, the TUC advises employers that they should have in place policies covering the use of email and the web, including social networking sites, so that there are no nasty surprises for either employer or employee should things ever go wrong.

The TUC advice suggests that whilst employers are completely within their rights to forbid staff from using sites such as Facebook, MySpace or Bebo in work time, a total ban may be something of an over-reaction.

Instead the TUC suggests that sensible employers, realising that their staff spend much of their waking hours in work and lead busy lives, should be trusted to spend a few minutes of their lunchbreak ‘poking’ their friends or making plans for outside work.

The guidance accepts that employees are paid to do a job, and it is clearly not acceptable for someone to spend hours a day on social networking sites when they should be getting on with their work. However, policies drawn up with the involvement of staff can set out will be and what will not be allowed.

The TUC advice also says that not enough workplaces are being up-front about what they expect from staff in terms of personal conduct when using social networking sites. As a result, a number of employers have disciplined staff for their conduct online, and more cases are likely to follow unless some sensible precautions are taken.

Work is a major part of our lives, and staff have always discussed aspects of their jobs in private with their friends and family, says the TUC. Now that online social networking is becoming mainstream however, many of these private conversations are written on the web, potentially searchable by the public.

Employers may have valid concerns about commercial confidentiality or reputation damage, but in most cases they should not over-react by attempting to stop staff from using such tools to help organise their personal lives. Working together with staff and their unions to devise a sensible conduct policy (for online and offline personal lives) that everyone is aware of, would prevent problems from arising in the first place.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: “Simply cracking down on use of new web tools like Facebook is not a sensible solution to a problem, which is only going to get bigger. It’s unreasonable for employers to try to stop their staff from having a life outside work, just because they can’t get their heads around the technology. Better to invest a little time in working out sensible conduct guidelines, so that there don’t need to be any nasty surprises for staff or employers.”

The TUC also warns that employers who take equal opportunities in recruitment seriously should not be tempted to check out the profiles of job applicants on Facebook. As only a minority of potential recruits will have public profiles on social networks, using information from this source can give an unfair advantage or disadvantage to certain candidates.

The TUC’s advice to employees can be found at www.worksmart.org.uk/rights/socialnetworking