Is there any way that social media policies can infringe on an employees rights?
Many social media guidelines merely mirror what is already acceptable in the off-line world: Don’t blab confidential client information; don’t share company trade secrets; be careful about where, when and how you choose to badmouth your employer. While companies tend to shy away from placing restrictions on employee activities outside of the workday, there’s a growing awareness that employees need guidelines. With Web 2.0, bad stuff can happen just as easily outside of company time. Many financial institutions (for example) have prohibited their employees from using social media because of concern that confidences may be divulged or that an employee may say something “out of compliance” with securities regulations. That said, it’s one thing to have a social media policy and quite another to spend time trolling the internet to enforce the behavior. Should employers ask employees to sign off on the policies, or is it enough that the employees read the policy? Ideally, employees should be
