SCCE and HCCA conducted this survey of compliance and ethics professionals in August 2009 to learn if and how companies are managing employee use of social media on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and received just under 800 responses from individuals at for-profit (both public and private), non-profit and governmental institutions.

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 please click on the following link:
http://www.corporatecompliance.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Surveys&Template=/surveyform.cfm&survey=FacebookLinkedInTwitter