Eleanor Hall reported this story on Thursday, February 9, 2017 12:31:45

ELEANOR HALL: Now to a provocative speech at a conference in Canberra today, on the increasingly fraught issue of social media in the workplace.



Monash University Associate Professor Peter Holland's research at the School of Management has highlighted the downsides of social media for employees and the need for them to be very careful about what they post.



But now he's suggesting that social media could be a powerful platform for employees to have a voice in the workforce.



He spoke to me just before he gave his speech and I asked him what changed his view:



PETER HOLLAND: It's probably more looking at both sides of it. While there's a lot of cases going through the courts at the moment regarding people's use or misuse of social media, it's also an opportunity, with declining union membership and a more fragmented workplace, that people can actually use it to actually talk about issues in the workplace with colleagues and also external stakeholders as well. So in a situation where you may not have someone representing you in the 21st century, this has the potential to be the voice of people in the workplace.



ELEANOR HALL: We saw a spectacular incident of that with HMV, when the workers took over the company's Twitter site. Is that what you're talking about?



PETER HOLLAND: That's one of them. Yeah, that's exactly right: where the situation was that people were being retrenched and brought in. They didn't know what was happening. And the people who were in charge of the website were being retrenched, so they enjoyed their last few minutes of work by tweeting out what was actually going on. And of course, by the time the company had shut the whole website down, the tweets had been retweeted 70,000 time.



ELEANOR HALL: You suggest that management needs to see opportunities of giving employees a voice via social media, despite the dangers. What do you mean by that? How is that going to help managers?



PETER HOLLAND: Well, more progressive companies in America like IBM use these enhanced ones called Yammer. And what they do effectively is that, if people make comments to a central source, these systems basic bubble-sort the issue.



So management can quickly identify what is concerning the workforce and deal with it before it becomes a major issue - or it becomes an issue that bursts out from the organisation.



So it's really more progressive companies are embracing this as a way of quickly talking to their workforce. Basically, like a canary in the mine, it can be a quick indicator to management that these are some of the issues that are concerning the workforce and we have an opportunity in real time to deal with them.



ELEANOR HALL: Isn't it still the case that, if an employee speaks out honestly, they can put themselves at risk of prosecution for damaging the company's reputation?



PETER HOLLAND: Well, absolutely. And again, we don't have the strongest whistleblowing laws in the world. So when people do speak out on issues that they consider are in the public interest or need to be aired because of issues within the company, they do run the risk of the company turning on them.



The case we are looking at, at the moment, is Starr versus the Department of Human Services, where (Daniel) Starr, basically in his own private time on his anonymous website, was making comments about the place he works. And a lot of it was defending government policy.



And at one stage someone made a comment about: "They're not effective enough" and he made the point that if they had more resources, they could be more effective in what they do.



Now, that's where the department decided to go and find out who this person was. It seems a benign comment, possibly, to most of us but the department didn't see it that way and it became a case: he lost his job and had to take it to court to have it reinstated. And I believe it's now being appealed again by the Department of Human Services.



So the key thing is: both sides need to be aware of the impact of what they say and do on social media; and also for the employer, simply hiding behind a policy that's emailed out to you is not enough. They need to make their employees well aware of the significance of working with social media, both in a private and public capacity.



ELEANOR HALL: Isn't there a danger that, if employees see that the employer has either set up a platform for them to have employee-to-employee conversations or is monitoring them very closely, that by its very nature the employer-run system would kill genuine conversation?



PETER HOLLAND: Absolutely. And the fundamental that underpins this is the issue of trust. I think that a good management builds a relationship of trust and lets people have their voice.



In my environment, we have our teaching evaluated every semester now. You get good, bad and indifferent. But you get used to it because what you're getting is an opportunity to see what people are saying and thinking about how your unit's run, how the organisation is run, so you can reflect on that and make a decision, if you accept it: as the employees have a lot of knowledge about how the organisation runs. And disaffected employees either leave or take their disaffections outside the organisation.



So if an organisation is mature enough and it accepts internal criticism, then this is going to be a very effective, time-current way of actually dealing with issues as they arise and hopefully deal with them as issues at that level, rather than becoming major issues within the organisation.



ELEANOR HALL: Professor Holland, thanks very much for joining us.



PETER HOLLAND: No problem. Thank you very much.



ELEANOR HALL: That's Professor Peter Holland from Monash University's School of Management. He's speaking at an industrial relations conference in Canberra today, giving a speech titled 'Utterly Disgraceful: social media and the workforce'.

