Here’s a couple of questions. Firstly, does your LinkedIn ‘Contact me about’ section have the ‘Career Opportunities’ section ticked? I’d guess the answer is probably yes. Secondly, would you consider this to be an action worthy of summary dismissal from your current job? This time I’d even bet money that your answer, like mine, would be “er no? Wait. Should I be worried?”
Yesterday a story broke about John Flexman a mid-level executive at oil exploration company BG who was fired over his LinkedIn CV and is now, predictably, suing his former employer. As well as having the nerve to suggest he wasn’t remotely interested in receiving any new job offers the BG Group also claimed that Mr Flexman had included several sensitive pieces of company information in his CV, admittedly a slightly more serious offence. Although, as Flexman pointed out much of this information was already available in public spaces and the rest it seems was his own opinion. Either way this sensitive and/or disparaging information about BG is now not only in Flexman’s CV but also in national newspapers amidst a storm of bad PR for the company.
The whole affair raises interesting questions about the surprisingly frequent disconnects between employee and employer perceptions of the right and wrong ways to use social media in a professional context.
It’s hard to think of anyone so loyal to their job that they’re utterly closed off to the possibility of anyone coming to them with even the most lucrative and stimulating job offer (with the exception of myself and the rest of the loyal RMM team of course!) However, we must remember that ten years ago the thought that their talented and laboriously-recruited workforce would continually be updating a CV and displaying it for the entire world to see would have made most employers froth at the mouth. Understandably, the relationship between employers and LinkedIn has always been a complex one, they recognise its potential for promoting their company expertise and finding talented recruits but they also know they’re competitors are using it for the same purposes.
In judging this particular case there’s a crucial piece of information which is missing from the story namely, does the BG Group have a set of social media guidelines that sets clear out dos and don’ts for their employees? A quick Google shows us that (beyond their troublesome employees on LinkedIn) BG group doesn’t have any sort of social media profile. However this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lumbering luddites, Apple famously doesn’t do social media but as we learned last month that hasn’t stopped them creating some rather good internal employee guidelines. So technically it’s possible that BG does have a clear and comprehensive set of guidelines which Mr Flexman has clearly defied, though if you put a gun to my head and asked me to take an educated guess…
I’d say that if they did have these guidelines then it seems to me extremely strange that such an incident could arise in the first place and that if it did then I wouldn’t expect Mr Flexman or any other wayward employee to a have a leg to stand on in disciplinary proceedings. If they didn’t have these guidelines and, as it seems, much of the information was already available or subjective opinion then they’re going to end up reaching for their cheque book.
There are two lessons here. Firstly, social media guidelines can empower employees to do sterling work for their employer in online social space (if you already work for a company with a good set of guidelines then you’ll probably know this). Secondly, and the lesson BG learned the hard way, if things go wrong such Guidelines can save a company from quite such an embarrassing trip through the courts and the papers.
Anyone interested in looking at stellar publically available guidelines should check out those made publically available by Intel, Coke-Cola and Dell
