Your Employee Is an Online Celebrity. Now What Do You Do?
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
> Co-branded employees should get some workday time for
> activities that support the company's goals. But
> setting limits on those activities, along with clear
> expectations for what else these employees need to
> accomplish, can help ensure that they complete their
> primary work and avoid resentment from their
> nonblogging, nontweeting colleagues.
It's articles like these that remind me why I hate working with BigCo. This kind of crap never happens at a small company. Sure, you have problems and clashes, but they're resolved ad hoc by humans, rather than by policies designed to align drones with the corporate culture.
When the person who manages a small company and is also a sole owner of it; its pretty common that they look at employees successfully blogging as at least partly, as a result of the business's (i e their) efforts. Conflicts also have a tendency to be arbitrated by the owner, not resoled ad hoc by humans.
I don't agree with this mindset, but I have seen this sort of behavior personally from small employers. I don't think my experiences are rare by any means.
As far as the article goes, I do think its rather over the top.
All this paragraph means is that if you put your blogging ahead of your job, you shouldn't be too surprised by pushback or even being let go. Every relationship is two ways, and if you honour your employment agreement you should be fine. Though I understand not all employers may think that way.
Whilst their regular 'work' may need to be covered, often the blog brings opportunities for guest posts on other sites and invitations to conference panels or speaking. This is turn is bringing in enough new business to justify and encourage their 'online celebrity'.
Let your employees determine their own work.
For the vast majority of companies in the real world, someone has to watch deadlines motivate employees and make sure things ship. If an employee is writing a personal blog instead of doing there work, something will give.
Credibility used to come from job titles, references, and performance reviews. It came only from people that companies hand-picked to be "managers". This meant that a person could be fired for any reason and the company could call it "performance" and that person had zero credibility. They held all the cards. The result was that companies could treat people (not only those they fired, but those they kept but could threaten with termination) badly.
That era's ending, and good riddance.
- Employee wasting company time.
- Employee divulging too much about company mechanisms and/or IP.
- Ownership of IP (content) created during company time.
- Ownership of blog/tweet followings gathered on company time.
I understand that it's annoying if you suspect someone's "wasting company time", but I the larger issue that people have with this is mostly irrespective of whether the blogging happens during work hours, especially as those become increasingly vague in definition. The issue, for the Baby Boomer clientele of WSJ, is that it punctures the illusion that people are supposed to keep that they're 100% dedicated to the corporate goals and working as hard as they can. (If you have side projects, even if they occur outside of work, they will decrease short-term work performance from a manager's perspective. If you work 80 hours per week in total and give your boss 40, what you're actually giving is worth 25-30, tops, because of the per-hour productivity slide.)
Baby Boomers had to put forward an image of total loyalty: no side projects, no interest in independent credibility, happy to work on whatever they were assigned to do. Millennials don't buy into that, not in the least. They put their careers ahead of management's objectives and it shows, and it's making a lot of people angry, but it's a rational response to a new economic reality.
Of course, that is only a workaround. As you described later, the issues in the long term need to be resolved properly.
(I think that's pretty clear from the context of the article though.)
This seems like a rather biased formulation. It's not because they're a bunch of arrogant little Millenial shits. They're responding to the collapse of the bilateral social contract between companies and career employees that was said to have traditionally existed, in their parents' generation and so on. In other words, this is reactive. A few years is the most you can hope to get out of any company now, not a lifelong career.
That's not the Millenials' fault. They didn't ask for that.
Some one who’s 20 today, and entering the workforce, would have been born in ’92. In ’92 lifelong single employer employment was well dead.
I see comments like this (and the WSJ’s) a bit, and it amazes me how slowly awareness of cultural changes percolate in to the mainstream. I’m nearing 40 and my parents didn’t expect life long employment. (Though they clearly desired it and went big time for stable employers: Banks, academia, government.)
It probably had a lot to do with the failure of unions, but that's just my guess.
I was around for the LBO bubble and the days of Michael Milken, and I'd probably argue even that was a consequence of the neutering of unions: If the unions had still been powerful (and perhaps less corrupt), they would have struck at the first company they could. By making an example of one company, perhaps bankrupting it, they could have scared off future LBO attempts.
Of course, greasing the palms of a few union leaders likely occurred during some of those LBOs. Perhaps the union model requires having saints for leaders, so add it to the list of why unions failed.
Its starting to feel like the whole notion of "employee" is fading fast. We're contractors now, all of us, and we are our own brand.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/court-taking-over...
Some of them will try, from time to time, but they will largely fail. Though to be on the safe side, don't share your social networking account passwords with anyone at the company you work for..
Hey, it's a social media profile, it's got your name on it, and pictures of you.
If as an employee you invent something that is related to your normal job activities, then it is deemed the property of your employer. So a travel agent tweeting airline deals should be considered to be doing their job, and if they are better than their colleagues, then indeed they should get a raise (unless they are sending customers towards a competitor, in which case they get fired). The same person tweeting about racing cars would not be deemed to be doing employment-related activity. An employer simply has to know that a potential employee is "famous online" before deciding whether or not to hire her, along with the risks that that might entail.
You have not fully digested the implications of the invention-rights assignment that all large companies (and most small companies) will make you sign.
Note that CA has interesting differences.
CA labor law is (as usual) a little different: If the invention is on your own time, with no resources whatsoever of the company, then the invention is yours regardless of the assignment . Of course, proving that you did not use company resources comes down to $$ in lawyers and court costs.
I see a far better society where individuals are respected more.
Thirty years ago, companies held all the cards, because credibility came from job titles and references that only a hand-picked class of stewards called "managers" could hand out, then managed to convince the peasants that it was "unethical" to play out-of-band (by having a friend give a reference as manager, or upgrading a title). If they wanted to reduce a target's career credibility to zero, they could do so. They could fire that person and give a terrible reference and call the person "disgruntled" if he said anything bad about them. They could even reduce the employee's job title and fail to acknowledge that he held the higher one at any time: their word against his. The only recourse an employee had was to sue the employer, which is mutually assured destruction at best, because even winning a termination suit is usually bad for a person's career.
Companies could also bring ruin upon people who spoke the truth about them, so almost no one did, and this kept their pristine organizational reputations (and thus, their credibility) intact.
We're moving toward a different sort of economy in which these middlemen are losing their hold. The one-sided expectation of "professionalism" (companies can be abusive, but employees and exes are expected to keep their interests and secrets no matter what) is ending. It's a very good thing, but it's scary for corporations because they've lost control of information, and because it's not hard to make recruiting just enough harder to cost the company more than, say, a 6- to 12-month severance (which is extremely generous, at least in the U.S.) would cost.