Employers taking steps to protect against employee-blogging risks

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Blogging has joined e-mail and other technology-related risks facing employers. While many employers have written policies governing e-mail and Internet use (and have fired employees who violate them), some employers now are beginning to do the same with employee blogging.

According to the 2006 Workplace E-Mail, Instant Messaging & Blog Survey from American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute, 6% of employers have terminated employees for e-mail misuse. Another 2% have dismissed workers for inappropriate instant messenger (IM) chat. And nearly 2% have fired workers for offensive blog content, including posts on employees’ personal home-based blogs.

Employee bloggers, who can be fired, or “dooced” in blog parlance, for blogging at work (and at home on their own computers) face increasing risk of termination by employers struggling to keep a lid on legal claims, regulatory fines and security breaches. With the blogosphere growing at the rate of one new blog per second, experts expect the ranks of dooced employee bloggers to swell.

“Employee bloggers mistakenly believe the First Amendment gives them the right to say whatever they want on their personal blogs. Wrong! The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech; it does not protect jobs. Bloggers who work for private employers in employment-at-will states can be fired for just about any reason — including blogging at home on their own time or at the office during work hours,” says Nancy Flynn, author of a newly released book, Blog Rules, and executive director of The ePolicy Institute.

Connecticut employers, though, need to keep in mind that state law protects employees’ free speech except when an employee’s speech materially interferes with his or her job performance or the working relationship.

When it comes to potential risks, unmanaged blogging dwarfs e-mail and IM. Among the blog risks Flynn identifies are copyright infringement, invasion of privacy, defamation, sexual harassment and other legal claims; trade secret theft, financial disclosures and other security breaches; blog “mob attacks” and other PR nightmares; productivity drains; and mismanagement of electronic business records.

According to the workplace survey:

8% of organizations operate business blogs.

9% have a policy governing the operation of personal blogs on company time.

7% have a policy governing employees’ business blog use and content.

7% have rules governing the content employees may post on their personal home-based blogs.

6% use policy to control personal postings on corporate blogs.

5% have strict anti-blog policies banning blog use on company time.

3% have blog record-retention policies.

“With 55% of business blogs ‘facing out’ for customers and other third parties to read, the lack of written blog rules is a potentially costly oversight,” says Flynn.

“Considering that less than 2% of organizations assign a lawyer or other responsible party to review employees’ entries and third parties’ comments prior to posting, the enforcement of written usage and content rules is a business-critical best practice for any organization engaged in blogging.”

In addition to having a policy, employers are advised to take advantage of technology tools to help manage employees’ blog use (and misuse). Seventeen percent of companies use technology to block employee access to external blog URLs, and another 12% regularly monitor the blogosphere to see what is being written about them. Blog monitoring and blocking, however, lag behind Internet and e-mail surveillance, according to the 2005 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey from the AMA and The ePolicy Institute. Fully 76% of employers monitor employees’ Web-site connections, 65% use technology to block connections to banned Web sites, and 55% monitor e-mail.