In his last post, Tyler K. Wilkinson addressed the question “Should employers friend a job applicant on Facebook?” This time, he looks at the dangers of basing employment decisions on what you find on employees’ Facebook walls.

You may expose yourself to liability when reprimanding or terminating employees because of their social media posts. Employers are beginning to implement social media policies that prohibit employees from posting information that is detrimental to the company. And most employers would agree that posting disparaging remarks about the company or coworkers could be grounds for discipline or even termination. But recent legal challenges demonstrate that a broad social media policy is not a cure-all for employees’ online misconduct. read more…

This week, we bring you a two-part series from Tyler K. Wilkinson examines how social media, especially Facebook, has blurred the lines between personal and professional life. In this post he addresses the question “Should employers friend a job applicant on Facebook?”

Screening job applicants online has become increasingly popular and easy to do. A recent report reveals that almost half of companies surveyed use social media sites to scope out potential employees before making a hiring decision. And job applicants increasingly are using social media sites to distinguish themselves from competitive applicant pools. Why? Social media sites can provide a wealth of information about an applicant that’s not typically included in a resumé.

But refusing to hire a job applicant because of information discovered from online screening may be against the law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of1964 prohibits you from refusing to hire an applicant because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Many state laws go even further, prohibiting you from refusing to hire an applicant because of  things like ancestry, arrest or conviction record, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, genetic information or use or nonuse of lawful products outside of work, among other things. Additional statutes prohibit you from refusing to hire applicants because of age, disability, and military service.

So what’s the problem with using social media to screen applicants? read more…

In a follow up to last week’s post with Gary Fealk’s tips on preserving electronic records, we use this post to remind you that signatures that are made and stored electronically should be treated the same as pen-and-paper signature.

Under the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESGNCA), electronic signatures and electronic contracts generally are just as legal and enforceable as paper contracts signed in ink for almost all transactions. While the Act doesn’t specify which technology must be used to obtain and store the signatures, it does mandate that states enact laws governing electronic signatures.

Technology for HR manual subscribers tip: Research the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and other laws that govern your electronic records.

The ESGNCA specifically excludes some transactions from the use of electronic signatures, including:

• health or life insurance termination notices;
• wills, adoption, divorce or other family matters;
• court orders;
• notices regarding termination of utility services;
• actions on debts secured by the home;
• product recalls;
• contracts or records covered by the Uniform Commercial Code; or
• documents required to accompany hazardous materials transportation.

Thus, almost all private transactions, such as employment applications, may be accomplished electronically.

Federal agencies have been adopting regulations for the electronic distribution of information for some legally required documents and for electronically filing required forms, waivers, etc. So you should be sure to check the requirements set by the relevant agency such as the IRS or the DOL for a particular transaction. For example, the IRS has rules for the electronic preparation and maintenance of I-9 forms.

Want to include electronic record preservation procedures and policies in your handbook but don’t know where to start? Learn how to streamline your electronic recordkeeping policies and ensure that your e-records won’t invite a lawsuit by participating in the interactive HR Hero webinar Electronic Records Rules for HR: How and What to Save and Delete presented on August 16 by Timothy Edwards of Axley Brynelson.

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.

Employment law attorney Gary S. Fealk discusses proper procedures for storing electronic records.

Today, more and more data is electronically stored on hard drives, CDs, flash drives, e-mail servers, and other storage devices. However, storing data electronically has its risks ― mainly the likelihood that essential information will be destroyed by accidental deletion, scheduled e-mail deletions, system upgrades, or other methods. Preserving your electronic records in an important step towards putting you in the best position to defend potential lawsuits.

As an HR professional, you should develop procedures for ensuring that electronically stored employment-related documents are preserved until your company is ready to destroy them. Supervisors should be informed of e-mail deletion policies and trained to keep copies of important e-mails concerning disciplinary issues. read more…

Employment law attorney Richard M. Yurko, Jr., reflects on the increasingly informal nature of communications as we move from face-t0-face to telephone to e-mail to text messages and offers suggestions for HR professionals having problems with a texting workforce.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described the phenomenon of the texting revolution that is upon us. The average teenager (age 13-17) sends and receives 3,339 texts per month ― more than 100 per day. Although adults ages 45-54 aren’t quite as prolific, they send and receive 323 texts each month (a 75% increase over last year). But there’s still a large gap between the two age groups. With newer and faster smartphones and the growing popularity of social media, expect the use of texting and other electronic communication methods to continue to grow. Young adults, however, will undoubtedly continue to lead the revolution.

A New Generation

A few years from now, the teen texting fanatics of today will be your new employees, and they bring a perspective and skill set to the workplace that may be unprecedented. While their computer skills may be impressive, they may not have the social and communication skills that many employers expect of new employees. How you respond to the challenge may determine how successful you are in integrating these new employees into your workforce. read more…

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.

In the second installment of a series on on executive Q&A videos, I shared Chip Cruze’s tips for making a video and posting it on the company intranet. For this post, I asked Cruze to give his perspective as communications planner on the benefits of executive Q&A videos.

When deciding if executive Q&A videos are right for your company, consider these facts:

• After a small, one-time investment (Flip UltraHD Video Camera – Black, 8 GB, 2 Hours (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL and Flip Video Tripod), the videos cost nothing but the time it takes to make and post them.

• The videos “cultivate a culture of communication” where “everyone feels welcome to ask” and “every question is fair game.”

• The videos can go further to creating an “open door” culture than an actual open door. Many executives and managers say they have an open door policy and they mean it. But it’s hard for many employees to walk through that door. “The majority people just aren’t going to walk into the CEO’s office and ask for a minute,” Cruze reasons. It’s much easier to submit a question for a video Q&A.

• Most videos should take only 5-10 minutes to make (you don’t want them to be too long). It would take most of us exponentially longer to type up, proof, and polish a companywide email or memo with the same amount of information.

Technology for HR: Videos aren’t the only way to use your intranet as an employee engagement tool. Research more options for getting the most out of your intranet online.

In the final post of the series on executive Q&A videos, I’ll talk to some of our company’s executives who participated in Cruze’s videos to get their perspectives.

– Celeste Blackburn

Want to start harnessing the power of your intranet to drive employee engagement, post your handbook, communicate with employees in an emergency, and more? The Technology for HR manual guides you through making the most of your company’s intranet.

In a previous post, I wrote about video Q&As with the C suite from my perspective as an employee just having watched series of said videos. I liked how they were done, giving employees to ask the hard questions anonymously and at the same time showing us that it was our department heads and president answering our questions (instead of rubber stamping an e-mail written by someone else).

For the second installment of the series into executive Q&A videos, I went to Chip Cruze, the executive producer of the series and our internal communications planner, for the inside scoop on making a video and what to do with the finished product. Here are his tips:

• It doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate.  Cruze shoots with a flip camera on a tripod set up on the interviewee’s desk.

• No reshoots! If at all possible, you want these answers to be unrehearsed. The more polished the answers become, the less genuine they will seem. If the video will feature more than one question, do everything in one take. Don’t splice anything together. “You don’t want to look slick,” Cruze says.

• Even though you want the videos to be “intentionally unscripted,” you can let the executives see the questions beforehand. They just have to promise not to rehearse in front of the bathroom mirror. It’s important to ensure the right people get the right questions.  Send out a list of all the questions and let the executives decide which ones best suit their expertise.

• Don’t be afraid to get a little personal. In their first videos, have the executives start with a little bit of biographical information. Cover the basics like name and a description of the work they do with the company. Then, have them offer up a little bit about themselves outside of work. It will help employees see them as more than the suit in the corner office.

• Post the videos on the company’s intranet. Depending on how you set security for your intranet, this offers an employees-only access option. Also, Cruze points out, “Everybody that is going to be here hasn’t always been here, but they should still have access to these answers and the personal side of these executives.” Posting the videos on your intranet creates an online library that you can use to familiarize new employees with your management team and employees can reference and watch  again if a question comes up.

Technology for HR: Research more options for using your intranet for employee engagement online.

Tune in net week when I investigate the benefits of executive Q&A videos from a communications planer’s perspective.

– Celeste Blackburn

Want to start harnessing the power of your intranet to drive employee engagement, post your handbook, communicate with employees in an emergency, and more? The Technology for HR manual guides you through making the most of your company’s intranet.

Recently, I was talking to Michael Burchell of the Great Place to Work Institute about programs that drive engagement and trust, and he mentioned Google’s TGIF (yes, that TGIF) program. Every Friday, Google executives take part in a live Q&A, and employees all over the world can participate online.

If you would like to do something similar at your company but can’t pull together a live Q&A every week, consider taking the idea to your intranet. Our company recently started a similar program, and I think it’s been very effective. Employees send their questions to the coordinator, who then incorporates those questions into video interviews with the appropriate members of the C suite (the president answers the questions about raises while the COO addresses concerns about reorganizing in the IT department), which he then posts on our intranet.

As an employee, the two things I like most about the intranet videos are: read more…