Lecture on Social Media and the Workplace

The lecture for this week got me to reflect a lot on workplace ethics, particularly in regard to social media.  In my opinion, there are two main areas to consider workplace ethics as it relates to social media: how we are talking about our jobs or work on social media and whether or not we are using social media while at work.  Both topics have their own implications and can greatly affect the way we interact with our jobs. 

The first one I would like to discuss is whether or not we are using personal social media while at work.  I do use social media at work, but I don’t feel it is “too much” of a distraction.  I like to check in on my Twitter feed pretty often, and because I am subscribed to certain topics that relate to my job (higher education and #AcAdv for advising topics), I actually feel like I am improving as an advisor using social media.  I also follow anytime my school is mentioned on Twitter and that helps me keep an eye on what is being discussed about the school (for example, as it is summer, there are a lot of posts about Orientation).  The lecture asked us if bosses should ethically be able to monitor what people are doing on social media.  To me, I think it depends on the industry you are in and what you are doing on social media.  So maybe if a boss discovers that someone is spending a lot of time on social media, they can give them a chance to justify why they are doing that.

The second issue I found myself reflecting on was how we speak about our jobs while on our personal social media account. We have seen a few documents at this point that discuss various companies’ policies for social media use and having a document like this can certainly help for making some of these policies well known.  Some of it is “common sense,” but some of it needs to be said because I don’t think people really appreciate just how public social media really is.  Personally, I try to only speak about my job in an informative way.  So maybe sharing discussions about advising that are going on or even Retweeting a nice picture of my campus that I find.  I never really complain about my job on social media because I feel like that is not what it is for.  I do think in many cases, however, it is probably just best that people not talk about where they work on social media, it’s just too risky.