An increasingly important legal issue – social media use in the workplace

A new entrant to the list of difficult and potentially political, employment law issues. A huge number of the population are now gripped by social media, whether facebook, linked in or a myriad of other sites. Social media can also be good for business, but there are some obvious downsides and risks, not least due to time wasted not working and risk of information leakage, reputation damage or worse.

The balance between an employer’s rights to protect his/her/it’s interests and the rights of employees that an employer will not be vindicated legally for overreacting is a difficult one.

In recognition of this problem, ACAS have now stepped into the date and offer an excellent online guide to how employers ought to deal with social media use. In particular, they counsel employers to beware the risk of being sued for discrimination if they look closely online at potential employees or existing employees as to what they are up to, their backgrounds, beliefs and so forth.

Some other interesting recent data suggests :-

• Over 50% of employees now spend time on social media at work, whether permitted or not
• A study by myjobgroup suggest that time spent by staff on social media may be costing the UK economy as much as £14 billion a year due to lower lost productivity.
• Employees have a different take on the social media issue with only some 15% in surveys admitting to being less productive as a result of social media, and over 10% claiming social media use actually makes them more productive.

The above figures suggest this is a serious and growing issue, and there is a chasm of perspectives – it looks as though this issue will feature in a lot of Tribunal cases in the forseeable future.