Social Media In & Around the Workplace
The conversation around employers and social media has grown and morphed as social media has expanded in the past decades. It has developed from a conversation about filtering personal life in order to create positive impressions with employers to being honest and open about your personality, hobbies and interests, especially within the creative industries. Moving forward, social media in and around the workplace has a lot of potential, yet needs to be viewed with a critical eye from both employees and employers. Hopefully, we will see social media evolve to land between two potential poles, those being a creative, collaborative, social space and a controlling, critical, unauthentic judgement tool. Let’s break down these two extremes.
On one end of the spectrum, social media could be used in the workplace as a tool to push and display creativity from employees, especially within the creative sector. Supporting the idea of creativity in employees personal lives would ultimately help that mindset transfer to the workplace. Furthermore, if employees can have personally unique and creative social media accounts, they will also have the skills to do the same with any social media or communications for their organizations. Social media also has the opportunity to create a collaborative and social space for employees, whether in small or large organizations. The use of Facebook groups, for example, could allow employees to learn about and support each other, as well as plan social activities, ultimately helping develop positive and collaborative cultures in the actual workplace. It also helps in separating work from play. Using social media for socializing provides a space for employees to be social outside the workplace. Facebook and other platforms also give way to much remix culture, pushing employees to again be creative, as well as potentially humorous and open minded.
On the other side of things, there is the use of social media as a monitoring tool, a way to screen potential employees, and control how employees are living their lives. This type of social media usage could be crushing to creativity, objectifying, disregard employee rights laws, and overly controlling. If people have information on their social media platforms such as their relationship status, age, or perhaps clearly identify as a specific ethnicity or with a certain religion, employers could discriminate, whether intentionally or unintentionally, against that candidate. Furthermore, if employers have strong controls over what is and what is not acceptable on their employee’s social media platforms, it can be difficult to draw the line between work and life for employees, as they are always filtering their online life through the mind of their employer. Where can the line be drawn between work and life?
Obviously both of these extremes have their downsides. Perhaps the prior is too liberal and the ladder is overbearing, but that is why the ideal future of social media in the workplace lands somewhere in the middle. All that said, there will be other factors involved in this future as well. Most importantly: two way communication.
It’s pretty common knowledge that successful communication, marketing and advertising is a two way communication channel, giving customers and/or audiences a voice. Well, because organizations have to have online presences, it provides employees and future employees the opportunity to find out about an organization based on how they are portraying themselves on social media. Now, I’m not saying we should do exactly what we don’t want organizations to do to us, but it is fair to ask organizations to be honest and authentic on social media (which really, they should be doing anyways) in order to understand if your values align. This two way communication now not only allows, but requires, both individuals and organizations to use a critical eye across platforms to weed out fake, overly curated, unathentic personalities.
To assist with this balance, social media guidelines could be used to create a mutual understanding of what is accepted and what is not for both employees and organizations. These, when falling between the extremes mentioned above, can help define a work-life balance for employees as well as hold organizations to certain standards and values.
The future of social media in the workplace could take a few paths, but we (my filter bubble) hope to see it lean left and support an environment and canvas of creativity, collaboration and socialization.
My personal take on social media in the present day workplace:
Hello world, yes I am a human being. I go to concerts and I go to bars, I like tattoos and street art (ah!), I drink, and I arguably spend too much time being social and end up procrastinating with ~everything~. I also value this earth, human beings, kindness, art, plants, adventure, travel and togetherness. Welcome to balance. If you don’t like who I authentically am and what I stand for, why would I want to work for you anyways?
