Should you Link In or Friend Up with your Employees?

August 10, 2009 / in Social Media / by Jason Terry

Should you Link In or Friend Up with your employees?
I think that it is fine to Link In with employees, but think twice about Facebook or MySpace.  You may learn something about your employee that you really didn’t want to know or shouldn’t know.  Also, social media is an ever growing archive of thoughts and interactions.  Let’s say you have a great employee that you are LinkedIn with.  You “recommend” them and say they do great work.  A year later, for whatever reason, you have to let that employee go for cause.  If they bring a suit against you, challenging the cause, they may use the LinkedIn recommendation as part of the argument that they were wrongfully terminated.  Be careful how you connect socially with your employees and what you do or don’t say.  Ask yourself the question, “should I say this knowing that the entire world has access to it for all time?”

Here is a link to more great thoughts on this topic…

Process is King
A closing thought… it has been a busy Monday!  It never ceases to amaze me how many companies just don’t have solid business process.  Someone goes on vacation and all hell breaks loose!  I guess that is just more job security for the Blue Gurus.  My advice to the small business owner is to make sure that the top priorities that make your business run have a simple procedure outlined for doing the process.  Everyone should know where these procedures live.  Someone is gone to lunch and they are the only one that knows how to <insert important thing here>.  This is an easy fix if you take a little time to document your process.  A side benefit is that you may uncover ways to improve the process dramatically just by documenting what you are doing today.