Previously, we have reported on several cases in which the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has taken employers to task for disciplining or firing employees for their tweets, Facebook posts, and blog posts. Recently, the tides have turned and the NLRB has issued a series of pro-employer decisions.

Technology for HR manual and HR Laws subscribers tip: Research social media policies online

On her blog,  Molly DiBianca notes that the employers’ actions were justified because they were “based on employees’ personal gripes, which fall outside the scope of protected activity, and which constituted acts of misconduct for which the employees could be terminated.”

You can listen to an interview Molly did with Boston’s NPR station for the story “What Can You Blog About Your Boss?” and read her basic dos and don’ts of social media for employers.

Do you know you need to do something about your social media policy but don’t know where to start? The Technology for HR manual will  help you develop workplace policies that take advantage of new technologies while dodging legal pitfalls.

We talked before about the importance of your online reputation and the lengths to which you can go to protect it. Now, employment law attorney Eileen M. Johnson turns the tables by suggesting that employers hire online persecutors to help fix the problems they so passionately took to the Internet over.

Alex Horton was a man with a grudge. A veteran of the Iraq war, he enrolled in his local community college on the GI Bill after he was discharged from the Army, hoping to pursue a career in journalism. However, problems in processing his GI education benefits at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) caused him great anxiety and stress. So, being a promising journalist-in-training, he chose to write about his problems on his blog, Army of Dude.

Horton’s blog was popular with both active-duty military personnel and veterans. He began blogging on Army of Dude in 2006 when he had one year left on his enlistment. His blog reported on everyday life for a soldier deployed to Iraq. His posts recounted the life of a 21-year-old in battle, no holds barred, with photos showing the conditions under which he and his comrades in arms lived and worked. By 2008, his following had grown well beyond his family and friends. Army of Dudewas a nominee for “Best Military Blog” at the 2007 and 2008 Weblog Awards.

When his enlistment ended, Horton enrolled in college and began providing advice for fellow veterans on various aspects of the GI Bill. He shared his own problems with collecting his well-deserved benefits. He called it as he saw it and soon became one of the more vocal critics of the VA.

So what did the VA do in response? It hired Horton to work on its official blog, “Vantage Point,”which focuses on issues facing veterans and active-duty troops. In effect, the VA hired one of its most vocal critics to continue to publicly criticize the department, an interesting move on the VA’s part.

Technology for HR manual and HR Laws subscribers’ tip: Get more practical tactics for using a blog online.

At a time when employers are adopting social media policies that include prohibitions on publicly criticizing the employer, fellow employees, customers, and competitors, the VA is using the employees who author its official blog as a sort of team of internal ombudsmen who point out the flaws in the system and make recommendations for changes based on their own ideas and the comments of their followers. Should this idea be considered by every employer? Probably not, but it might be worth contemplating in some situations.

Eileen Johnson is an attorney with Whiteford, Taylor & Preston L.L.P. in Baltimore, Maryland. She has more than 25 years of experience advising nonprofit organizations and associations on a wide variety of legal issues and writes a monthly column, “Eileen’s Eye on the Net,” for Maryland Employment Law Letter.

Want to start an HR blog at your company but don’t know where to start? The Technology for HR manual will show you how to use blogs as an HR tool, shows you what an HR blog could look like, and walks you through what you should tell employees about your blog.

Employment law attorney, blogger, and social media expert Molly DiBianca has written a series of blog posts of “LinkedIn Lessons for Employers.” She notes that employers often see LinkedIn as the “good son” of the social media world since it has practical workplace uses and doesn’t offer the distractions of Facebook. Here are the highlights of her discussion about three employment-law cases in which LinkedIn has played a substantive role.

1. Integrated Enterprise:  Will the Real Employer Please Stand Up?

In Freire v. Keystone Title Settlement Services, the plaintiff sued her former employer, alleging unlawful harassment and discrimination. The employer argued, among other things, that it did not employ the minimum number of employees to subject it to liability under Title VII. The plaintiff countered that the employer and its parent company operated as an integrated enterprise and, together, did employ the required minimum number of employees.

As evidence of the integrated nature of the two entities, the plaintiff introduced the LinkedIn profile of her former supervisor, which stated that the supervisor was employed by the parent company. The defendant countered with an affidavit by the supervisor, which stated that the supervisor had mistakenly used the wrong company name as her employer and that she had completed that portion of her LinkedIn profile before the relevant period.

Technology for HR manual and HR Laws subscribers tip: Research social media policies online

2. Successor Liability

In Steinberg v. Young, the plaintiff had alleged breach of his employment contract. The claim went to arbitration and the plaintiff won. When he tried to collect on the judgment, though, he claimed that the defendant—the owner or majority shareholder of several corporate entities, including the one that had lost in arbitration—had been fraudulently transferring assets out of the various entities to defeat the plaintiff’s collection efforts.

The plaintiff pursued a claim in federal court on the basis of the state’s fraudulent-conveyances law and under a theory of successor liability. On the successor-liability claim, the court found that there was evidence to support that the defendant was the “mere continuation” of one of the corporate entities. In denying the defendant’s motion for summary judgment, the court looked to the LinkedIn profiles of at least five employees of the original company who had continued with the successor company.

3. Agency Relationship

In Park W. Galleries, Inc. v. Hochman, the defendant filed a counter-claim against the plaintiff-art gallery, alleging that an individual, acting on behalf of the gallery, posted defamatory statements about the gallery on his blog.  In response, the art gallery argued that there was no evidence to show that the individuals who made the statements were acting on the gallery’s behalf.  The gallery’s CEO testified that individual was not and had never been an agent or employee of the gallery and that the gallery had never authorized the individual to speak on its behalf.

The test to determine whether there is an agency relationship such that an entity may be held liable for an individual’s actions or statements is whether the principal has a right to control the actions of the agent.  Under Michigan law, if there is any evidence to support the existence of an agency relationship, the question cannot be decided by the court but, instead, must be presented to the jury.

The court determined that there was sufficient evidence to support the existence of an agency relationship between one of the individuals when he made the allegedly defamatory statement.  The evidence cited by the court was a posting on the individual’s LinkedIn profile, on which he had identified himself as a “Consultant/Writer at Park West Gallery.”  In the “Experience” section of his profile, his profile included experience as a “Public Relations/Blogger/Writer” for the gallery.  And, according to the gallery’s website, the individual was editing a book to celebrate the gallery’s 40th anniversary.

Based on this evidence, the court concluded that the individual could have been speaking on behalf at the behest of the gallery when he posted the allegedly defamatory statements on his blog.

Tune in Friday to find out what you should do when you find a former employee’s LinkedIn account has wrong information about her time with your company.

– Molly DiBianca

Do you know you need to do something about your social media policy but don’t know where to start? The Technology for HR manual will  help you develop workplace policies that take advantage of new technologies while dodging legal pitfalls.

Learn more about LinkedIn at the July 14 webinar LinkedIn as Employee Reference Tool: How to Overcome Privacy, Liability, and Discrimination Challenges

On his blog The Oswald Letters, M. Lee Smith Publishers President Dan Oswald reflects on the dilemma that the technology we use in the workplace in efforts to get more done might actually be making us less efficient.  He takes account of a day in his life — the life of many blue-tooth/smartphone/laptop/tablet-toting workers — and concludes that we need to take control of our time instead of letting technology fill every minute of it. Read his post and ask yourself “Do I use my technology to save time, or does my technology take all my time?”

How far can you go to prohibit certain online conduct by employees on both work and personal computers? What parameters can you suggest for employees who blog? When employees make disparaging comments about your company and their supervisors on password-protected social networks, what recourse do you have?

Test your HRIQ on those and other social media related dilemmas by taking the latest HR Hero quiz.

In the That’s What She Said blog, Ford & Harrison attorneys dissect the HR lessons from NBC’s hit comedy series The Office. In last week’s episode “The Search,” the Scranton-based Dunder Mifflin crew decides to engage in a little light-hearted fun and holds a caption contest for one of Pam’s sketches. Gabe Lewis (who represents Sabre, the company that has bought out Dunder Mifflin) throws down a few (predictable) rules like “your captions may not insult the company.”  In an aside,  Gabe speaks directly to the camera  to introduce “Sticky Quips” — large, colorful, adhesive-backed, cartoon-balloon-shaped sticky notes (think sticky notes on steroids) .

Brian Kurtz used “StickyQuips” in the headline for the post he wrote for That’s What She Said after “The Search” episode aired Thursday night. While he didn’t mention the aside or the new product, Kurtz did have brief negative and positive things to say about Gabe’s management style. To wit: “Gabe is a buzzkill who excels at sucking the life out of any room. But his sixth sense for avoiding employment liability is uncanny.” Fair enough. Brian hit the bad and the good. End of story, right?

Not for Tony Kessler, one of the blog shepherds and social media pioneers at M. Lee Smith. Tony’s part of the story offers inspiration for aspiring bloggers and HR personnel looking to get into blogging or other forms of social media and provides a couple of tips for those already managing a blog (or any other site where comments from the public must be monitored). Here is his adventure in technology: read more…

In our two-part series on hosting a blog on your company’s intranet, I mentioned that one way to use such a blog is as a project journal. Doing so offers many benefits:

• No matter what happens to the employee, the information stays with the blog. If an employee leaves in the middle of the project, you don’t have to worry about making sure he maps out his work before saying goodbye because it already lives on the blog. read more…

Ever since social networking became an issue requiring workplace policies, our Employers Counsel Network attorneys have disagreed on many finer points of what should be in such a policy but agree on at least one key element: Employees can be held responsible for and disciplined for posts that attack or disparage the company or a coworker. The idea is that employees will be held to the same code of conduct on the Internet (on sites where they affiliate themselves with work) as they would in the office.  Seems the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has something to say about that.

Last week, the NLRB filed a complaint against American Medical Response of Connecticut, Inc., alleging that it violated the National Labor Relations Act by firing an employee for Facebook postings that were critical of her supervisor and charging that the company’s blogging and Internet posting policies are “overly broad.” The Board is maintaining that the employee’s Facebook posts were “protected concerted activity.” read more…

You’ve decided you want to make the most of a blog (or blogs) on your intranet. While there are some things you want everyone to be able to see (posts that praise employees for a job well done), there may be times when you only want specific users to see certain posts (when a blog is being used as a place to brainstorm a top-secret project). One way to do that is to have different blogs for different groups, but you can also have one large company blog with several categories with visibility determined by user permissions.

Here are some categories to consider:

read more…

You were so inspired by our first intranet post that you now have a nice, new (or newly remodeled) intranet, and you want to know what you should put on it. Or maybe your company has had an intranet for a long time and you’re looking for new ways to use the resource. A blog can be an invaluable asset to your company and a central focus of a thriving intranet.

You can use an intranet blog purely as (1) a social connector and culture builder, (2) a way to communicate with employees, (3) a project management tool, (4) a source for new ideas, or (5) all of the above. The blog can be open to everyone in the company or only for certain employees, teams, or projects.

Advantages to having an internal blog on your intranet include: read more…