Employer online monitoring meets resistance

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen

By Kristi Jourdan THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A gap is growing between workers and employers over social networking and other Internet behavior.

On the one hand, a series of notorious videos, including one involving a pizza joint and bodily functions, is prompting more concern among employers that workers' behavior online can harm their businesses.

But the reaction that forced a Montana city to back off its request for the log-in information of potential employees indicates there is still some information people feel entitled to guard.

Deloitte LLP's 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey, released in May, found a big gap between employers and employees on whether businesses should be able to monitor Internet behavior off the clock.

Sixty percent of the business executives surveyed said they had a right to know how their organizations were portrayed by employees in online social networks, as opposed to 53 percent of employees who said that information was private. Although the majority of employees said the information was private, an even-larger share - 74 percent - said it's easy to damage a company's reputation on social media.

More than half of the executives surveyed said that reputational risk and social networking should be a boardroom issue, but only 15 percent of them follow through with discussing it at meetings.

The study, which measures employee online behavior and the impact it can have on a business' reputation, surveyed about 2,000 employed adults as well as 500 business executives in April.

Defenders of monitoring employees' online behavior point to several recent notorious cases, including "viral," or massively viewed, videos of workers at two of America's top fast-food chains and a group of individuals purporting to be police officers responsible for guarding America's lawmakers.

It was only two months ago that U.S. Capitol Police investigated claims that its officers were participating in online groups that posted degrading references to women and glorified excessive drinking. A handful of officers purportedly involved in the offensive groups blocked or deleted their sites as a result.

In April, two North Carolina Domino's Pizza employees were fired for contaminating food and kitchen utensils, appearing to sneeze on them, among other things, after posting a video online about the prank.