SCCE Survey: 25% of Employees Have Been Disciplined for Social Networking Activities

The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics recently published the interesting results of a survey they conducted about how companies are dealing with the proliferation of employees actively using social networking sites.

According to the SCCE survey on employees and social networking, via HR Morning, 25% of employees have been disciplined for activities on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The results of the SCCE’s survey are explained in more detail below.

HR Morning also provides these key tips for implementing a corporate social media policy:

What does a good policy look like? It should cover two basic elements:

1. Make it clear that employees have no right to privacy when they post on a public social-networking site, no matter where they connect from. If it’s on the site and can be read, it can be used as grounds for discipline.
2. Remind employees that company policies (like anti-harassment) extend to online behavior.

Follow the link to view the press release issued by the SCCE announcing the findings of its survey. The following is taking directly from the survey and breaks down the survey’s key findings.

SCCE Survey Results

The survey results indicate that there is far from a consistent approach either to policy making or monitoring of employee behavior. While some companies have set out a specific policy for their employees’ online social networking activities, half have not. Monitoring tends to be passive more than active, despite the fact that one quarter of respondents reported that their employer has had to discipline an employee for activities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

“Business clearly hasn’t caught up with what its employees are doing online. The risks are two fold. First there remains the business risk of employees doing things online that may reflect badly on the company. The second is that, as business develops policies and procedures in this area there are going to be a lot of people finding that what they have long done is no longer acceptable at work. During the adjustment period there is likely to be a great deal of friction created.”
Despite the lack of formality in processes, companies are finding themselves needing to discipline employees for online behavior at social networking sites. 24% of respondents reported that an employee had been disciplined in their organization for activities on

Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Interestingly, the percentage was much higher for the not-for-profit sector (33%) than for the for-profit sector (13%). And demonstrating a lack of development of processes in this area, 37% of respondents did not know if there had been an incident leading to discipline in their organization.

“Ten years ago many businesses made the mistake of thinking that the Internet was a flash in the pan and would somehow go away. Companies and their compliance teams can’t make the same mistake with the social networking phenomenon. They need to understand it and think through whether they are going to regulate or, do what many have done including the SCCE and HCCA: figure out the proper way to embrace it by participating in it.”

To review the complete survey results you can also go to this link.

We will be posting a few featured articles around this topic over the next few weeks and months, so stay tuned. This is certainly an emerging area of focus for compliance professionals across the globe as the Internet and social media become more ingrained in the daily lives of everyone.

* – Social media image credit: WeBlogCRM.com

Tags: corporate compliance, corporate policy, press release, scce, social media, social media policy, social networking policy, survey