Collateral Damage

A few incidents in the media lately have called attention to the “problem” of indiscreet employee remarks in social media – some of them entirely outrageous, others seemingly innocuous – that led to the termination of employees.   This has been an ongoing issue, and is a constant threat to the employee and a constant concern to the customer – but as usual, the attention is drawn to a symptom, rather than the root cause.

The root cause, to my way of thinking, is the breakdown in a relationship between employee and employer, which is being poorly handled on both sides.  Depending on the editorial slant of a given publication or a particular journalist, on the various factors they believe to have the most influence on the sentiment of their readership, it can be spun to favor one side or another, and even the details of a given incident are skewed depending on which “side” is describing the situation.

Evil Employees

Business publications tend to take the perspective that the employee is evil – and stir up a great deal of panic among management and HR types over the potential that some disgruntled employee who seeks to harm his company for no good reason would use social media as a way to vent his frustrations, either indiscreetly or through a desire to get some sort of retribution for a situation in which the employer is completely innocent.

But that’s likely not entirely true: it’s not reasonable to suggest that the employees of a firm are taken out of the blue with a desire to harm their employers.  There is always something that was done to a person that causes them to react, and the fact that they react through social media simply reflects that the employer’s self-defined methods of reacting were not regarded as sufficiently effective.

Any negative remark an employee makes in a public forum has probably been made in the workplace, either directly to or within earshot of management, and probably multiple times.  It was either ignored or suppressed, and the situation perpetuated until the employee found another avenue of expression.

In instances where the employee never said anything in the workplace, that’s likely an even worse situation: he had no reason to expect it would be heard – or had reason to expect that if he voiced a negative opinion, there would be an equally negative reaction on the part of the firm.   The very worst firms are likely those whose employees say nothing at all.

Evil Employers

Consumer publications tend to paint the employers as evil, using the typical spat of pejoratives to paint businesses as callus feudal overlords who expect to inflict suffering on their subjects and to be thanked for doing so, and that the employee is the innocent party who was merely expressing his opinion, off the clock and as a private citizen.

But neither is that entirely true:  in the incidents I’ve seen, the employee who made a negative remark about their company was at best indiscreet, and a person of reasonable intelligence would realize that if they make a negative remark about a company in public, just as if they make a negative remark about a person in public, that it’s going to get back to them eventually, and they will not be pleased about it.

The “public/private” dichotomy is often held up as a defense, but it holds little credibility.   There are certain communications in which privacy is expected – but in most instances, the individual posted their remark to a place were it could be widely seen.   A claim of “I didn’t think at the time” may hold some water, but “I didn’t know at all” holds none.

Also, in many instances, the remark in question called out the company by name: the employee didn’t state that “My boss humiliated me for a making simple mistake” but that “Mr. ______ at _______ humiliated me by _______ for making a simple mistake.”     The person who makes such a remark knows, but failed to consider, that a simple text-search would call this to the attention of the very person and company they were writing about, and that they would not be happy to see it, even if it’s an accurate description of what actually occurred.

Toxic Relationships

Because the story is spun one way and the other, there’s not much that can be learned from a single incident, but taken collectively, there’s much to be learned about the relationship in considering both sides of the story comparatively: every negative comment arises from an incident or a chain of incidents that have caused the employee to form a negative opinion and to feel that communicating it internally would be fruitless.  The react solely to the comment is to do nothing to rectify the situation that gave the employee incentive to make such a comment.