This article in the Chicago Tribune today was interesting to read, although it didn’t cover any new ground in the debate about employee blogging. Now that I work for a commercial entity again, this is an issue that I am more aware of. As far as I know there is no official blogging policy at my company, although a broader policy about Internet use could be construed to cover it. It is related to my previous post in that the author mentions the accessibility via Google and other search engines of whatever people choose to write in their blogs, and how easy it is to get into trouble if something negative is written about an employer. It also mentions that concerns by employers about their employees blogging are very similar to concerns employers had back when universal access to email and the World Wide Web for employees was a new thing.

I have had firsthand experience with this concern on the part of an employer. When I was at the University of Chicago I was asked to chair a task force in their library’s technical services division that was charged with articulating a set of guidelines for acceptable use of the Internet on the part of librarians and staff. The formulation of this task force was largely prompted by concern by some supervisors in technical services about abuse of Internet and email on the part of their staff. The task force duly arrived at a set of guidelines but frankly, they were not taken seriously and, at least for the duration of my time there, were not enforced that I know of. My personal view of the situation as a manager of several staff was (and still is) to rely upon principles of common sense and good supervision rather than an artificial set of rules or guidelines. I remember likening the potential for abuse of email to abuse of using the telephone. There is nothing new in this, really. And blogging is similar. If I as a supervisor have concrete, well understood expectations for performance by my employees, along with concrete ways of measuring that performance, the issue of email/blogging/telephone/Internet abuse can be easily dealt with. For instance, I made clear to my staff that I really didn’t care if they used the Internet for personal things IF (and that is an important point) their performance was good. That is, if they were getting their assigned work done in a superior fashion then using the Internet for surfing or writing emails or whatever was just fine with me. However, I also made it clear that if performance was subpar then personal use of the Internet would be one of the key areas I would focus on for that staff member, and I would restrict or curtail that activity if it was shown to be a contributing factor to their negative job performance. Unfortunately, my experience has shown that there are many supervisors in libraries (and maybe elsewhere) who lack common sense and/or people leadership skills and who turn to artificial rules and regulations to do their work for them.