Friday, November 12th, 2010
The British Columbia Labour Relations Board recently upheld the firing of two employees by a car dealership over comments they posted on Facebook about their employer. The lawyer for the employer stated that he believes this is the first Facebook firing case to be heard in Canada.
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Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
It is becoming more and more common to hear of employers “googling” prospective employees. Where a prospective employee has a significant presence on the Internet through social media, the employer may become privy to a number of facts about the prospective employee that he or she may not have known previously.
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Friday, September 3rd, 2010
I just read an interesting article saying that Germany may be the first to pass a law making it illegal for prospective employers to spy on applicants’ private postings on Facebook. Do you think this type of law could ever be passed in Canada?
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Monday, August 23rd, 2010
The common meaning of multi-tasking is doing more than one thing at once, like walking and chewing gum. Do you hold several conversations at the same time—on the phone, on Facebook and in person? Do you listen to music or the radio or watch TV or eat lunch while you check your favourite blogs and watch your auctions on eBay? Do you have several work projects on the go, spread across your real and virtual desktops? Is it hard to keep track?
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Monday, July 19th, 2010
We’ve heard a bunch of stories over the past year about companies firing or not hiring employees, or challenging their claims of illness, over inappropriate online behaviour, particularly comments and photos posted on Facebook and other social networking websites. While the media have made a big deal of these cases, none has had the profile of CNN’s recent firing of Middle East correspondent, Octavia Nasr. The US news giant felt Nasr had compromised her credibility by publicly tweeting her respect for a prominent Islamic cleric on his death. The Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah had ties to controversial political action group Hezbollah.
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Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
I never understood the fascination to this Facebook application… a game called Farmville. Certain members of my family play it and some of my co-workers indulge in it. Most of the Facebook status updates or newsfeeds I see over my network involve someone looking for something or finding something in Farmville, and would like to share it with me. For example, “Christina was farming when she found a Wandering Stallion! Christina wants her friends to help the Wandering Stallion by giving him shelter for the night“.
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Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Connected employees are ambassadors for their employers. Some employers might find this frightening, but it is also inevitable. Some companies will worry about the message that their employees are spreading across their social networks and the Internet, and complain about their inability to control it; but others would pay good money for employees who are so engaged that they will work at all hours and act as corporate social media ambassadors at all times.
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Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Social media are new, and their value is not entirely clear, especially to businesses that are doing just fine as they are, thank you very much. Heck, it’s even possible that blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other Web 2.0 and social networking services will turn out to be passing fads, in which case, maybe companies that ignore them will have the last laugh on the matter. I don’t know about that, but I will say this: the generation that grew up on the Internet and began to enter the labour market over the last decade is unlikely to want to shift to a way of doing things that doesn’t involve the Internet and its associated applications and gadgets. And their children—well, who can say how connected they’ll be. It would take an extremely authoritarian approach to return to the workplace of our parents, and likely an approach that looks backward rather than ahead. But enough of prediction, let’s talk about some interesting stuff!
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Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
To a casual observer, it might appear that time management has fallen to the wayside at many workplaces today: employees work well beyond their scheduled hours, including while on lunch breaks, during leisure time and social events and even on vacation. But with proper scheduling, time management should prevent work from expanding beyond regular work hours—as was the case before the Internet age. Instead, in the “knowledge economy”, where the smart phone rules, scheduled work hours have become nearly meaningless.
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Monday, October 19th, 2009
Here’s a question about an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant:
By using social networking sites—such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn—to search for and recruit employees, are employers discriminating against groups that are less likely to use those services?
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Monday, October 5th, 2009
Some companies have applied traditional methods to the problem of social media at work: the soft approach attempts to monitor and regulate via policies; and the hard approach simply slams the door on employee access and use with a heavy hand. Neither of these works particularly well. The former will almost certainly lead to employee confusion and efforts—either intentional or not—to circumvent the policy, and the latter will likely result in discontented employees finding other ways to work around the blockade. In addition, both are difficult, if not impossible, to enforce fully; and attempts to bypass or evade controls could even lead to damage of physical or virtual IT resources.
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Thursday, October 1st, 2009
If you’re reading this blog post, I’ll bet that you’re at work, on company time. Should you feel bad about that? I’d like to believe that what you’re reading has value, and will add to your understanding of today’s workplace and HR practices, and maybe that’s justification enough. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, besides reading blogs, you also looked at your Facebook account and maybe even sent a few tweets while at work. What’s your justification for that?
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