Kobe Bryant lets the world know how he is feeling through the media. There's even a cool Kobe Advisory System in the LA Times to help you know his mood. Guess what? Facebook can provide the same details about how your employees feel!
I've been digging into Facebook lately to evaluate it as an alternative communication platform
to employees. The goal? To use a social networking platform as a means to serve employees. At this point, I would include all the normal platforms (email, landline, cell, face-to-face) as well as some 2.0 technologies (blogs, text-messaging, IM) as methods we employ to serve and communicate to employees.
Pure social networking (Facebook) seems like the next step. After all, got to go where the kids are and get straight on the technology, right? After digging in, there's just this one little problem...
Employees can be WAY too candid about how they are feeling about their job, their co-workers, and even their boss on a social networking site like Facebook. One of the features in Facebook is "Status Stories", which shows up in the user's main profile window called "My Feed". Lots of Facebook users use Status Stories to tell the world how they feel on a given day, about light and serious issues alike. The result is a self-reported chronology of the trivial, conversational and serious alike. While I can't provide an actual thread, here's a hypothetical sample from an employee I'll call "Robbie":
-October 19 - Robbie just ended a bad relationship
-October 18 - Robbie thinks his manager is a #$@#
-October 17 - Robbie saw his manager looking in a lustful way at a female in the office
-October 16 - Robbie thinks his monitor smells like tuna
Nice... So work with me on this one. You've made the decision to dip into social networking as part of your drive to become 2.0 and connect with employees, and this is how you are rewarded? Now you've got to figure out your legal obligation to investigate the Status Stories included on the feed once you've seen them. Imagine approaching John to tell him you checked him out on Facebook, and you would like to inquire more about the lustful looks from the manager...ugh...
Which indicates it may be better to let the dust settle a bit on the Social Networking sites until you can avoid that type of information. Maybe someone will use the open development architecture on Facebook to develop an Employee Advisory System, which will give you a dashboard on how employees are feeling, similar to the graphic of Kobe above. All without having to dig into individual profiles. Now that would be sweet!!!!
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