Web-Posting Incident Makes Businesses Rethink Employee-Conduct PoliciesWeb-Posting Incident Makes Businesses Rethink Employee-Conduct Policies

Blogging and other cyberactivities are giving companies new reasons to pull out the ol' employee handbook to revise employee conduct policies. It also should prompt some workers to dust off their common sense.

Last month, the Automobile Club of Southern California, an affiliate of the AAA, fired 27 employees after a co-worker complained about "harassing" and insulting comments the employees made in postings on the social- networking Web site MySpace.com.

During the automobile club's investigation into the matter, the company also discovered that some of the employees, including administrative and roadside-assistance workers, had discussed on the site plans to disrupt emergency road service to club members.

"Not sending a tow truck, that hits at the core of our services," says a spokeswoman for the auto club. "That's very dangerous." Those posted comments, as well as the remarks about the weight and sexual orientation of another worker, led to the club's decision to fire the workers.

The employees were fired even though the comments weren't posted during work hours, nor did they use company computers to make the postings. Labor attorneys say First Amendment free-speech rights don't preclude private employers from setting standards for employee behavior for off-hour activities such as cyberspace commentary that's disparaging to the company or constitutes harassment of co-workers.

Employers for the most part aren't prevented from taking action against employees who make negative comments about other workers, create a hostile work environment, or are involved in other activities--even outside of the workplace--that don't meet a company's conduct standards, says Larry Lorber, a labor attorney with the Proskauer Rose LLP law firm. Only a few states, including New York, have laws that prohibit employers from firing workers for off-hour behavior other than illegal activities or unauthorized moonlighting.

Formal corporate policies governing blogging and other employee cyberactivities are just evolving. HR policies often need to catch up with the challenges new technologies present in the workplace. The San Diego-based automobile club doesn't have a specific policy about employee blogging, Internet messaging, or other cyberactivities. "We're looking into what we should do about that now," the spokeswoman says.

Some companies already are updating their employee-conduct and harassment rules to specifically address behavior on the Web, even when workers are off duty or off company premises. "If companies are going to police these activities, then they should make the policies clear so that enforcement is a whole lot easier," Lorber says.

TriNet Group Inc. a provider of HR-management services, is developing policy language its clients can include in their employee manuals and HR policies that spell out how employees are expected to behave when they use electronic media like blogs both at work and outside, says Greg Hammond, executive VP and general counsel. "HR is often reactive, but HR is also a good bully pulpit" for instructing employees on what a company expects in their behavior, he says.

J. Walter Thompson Co., an advertising and media company, is weighing instituting a blogging policy for employees. If approved by company management, the guidelines will be posted on the company's intranet, says Sean Mulholland, a search-engine marketing manager who wrote the guidelines. The draft guidelines are "really a commonsense approach to blogging," Mulholland says.

While the company recognizes that it can't control what employees do in their free time, they'll be advised not to use personal blogs to bad-mouth the company, clients, or other employees. The company won't actively monitor employees' personal blog activities, but if the company gets a complaint, employees will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, depending on the severity of the offense. "We'll enforce the guidelines, but we're not going to be out there policing the Internet, Googling employees to see if they've got a blog and to see what they're doing," he says.

Just as employees learned a few years ago that company E-mail systems were monitored by their employers and that messages aren't private, employees will begin to better understand that their behavior on the Web--whether blogging on a company Web site or posting messages about an employer on a third-party site--can have job consequences, Lorber says.

The bottom line: Employees can't say whatever they want, wherever they want.