Social media at work

What are your concerns surrounding the use of social media at work and how are you dealing with them?

Lee Chown How

Country General Manager, Lenovo Singapore

Lenovo fully supports social media. It can be successfully applied for quick dissemination of information. Internally, we use engines such as wikis, internal blogs and forums to engage with our employees. Besides having a global social media team in place, we also have social media policies and tools to encourage responsible employee blogging and to educate them on the key dos and don’ts such as etiquettes and security considerations.

When it comes to employees using social media at work, our guiding principle is “moderation”. Employees should be familiar with our policies and use common sense to ensure they do not accidentally share company confidential information inappropriately or pre-maturely with an external audience.

We treat employees as adults and therefore do not believe in implementing processes where staff are required to seek approval when sharing content on social networks. Instead, we encourage an open environment and awareness of policies and the right personnel to approach when they are uncertain about whether to share certain content.

Phillip Raskin

Managing Consultant, Text 100 Singapore

Actually, one of our core areas of work now is social media – we manage Facebook and Twitter accounts for clients, and help other clients develop and implement social media strategies. We also use social media to keep up on trends and news. In addition, we have young staff who are already active on social media.

With a group of staff so accustomed to sharing online, we have to be very clear about what client or staff news we Tweet about, or what type of mood updates we might put on Skype or Facebook. For instance, if someone has a tough client meeting and then changes, his/her online status to “I hate my client”, it’s quite dangerous since our clients tend to be on all our social media lists and they can easily put two and two together. A departing staff, incoming client or embargoed product announcement can likewise be inadvertently announced to the world.

Overall, though, social media is a vital part of our business, and we work with staff to ensure they understand the boundaries of the playing field. And after that, it’s up to them to enjoy and use it.

Michael Loh

Partner, Clifford Law LLP

We recognise that people need to communicate and relate. Social media has fulfilled that need with its ease of access from the very computer that staff work on. The good thing about social media, strangely, is that staff can engage in social media while working at the same time. This seems like a more efficient use of time to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

Our first concern is the basic worry that time and quality of work will be affected. Also, in our line of work, standards of confidentiality of information, content and documents are inviolable. Therefore, we are concerned with the possibility of some stray remark being let slip in the midst of such communications which could compromise the trust between our firm and our clients. This is worsened by the near immortal permanence of any entry.

On a more mundane note, passing by a screen on the social media page is rather irksome, giving rise to an impression that no work is being done although the worker may have been very efficient and so happened to be on that page at that time.