The Costco Connection - December 2017

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WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Should bosses and employees friend each other on Facebook?

Jessica Lamb is social media manager at Brain Works, a marketing agency based in Moncton, New Brunswick (brainworksmarket ing.ca).

Dr. Wendy R.

Carroll is director of the Executive Master of Business Administration Program and associate professor in the Department of Management at the Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

IS IT SMART to include your colleagues, employees or even your boss on your social platforms? Yes! Social media is a great way for individuals to connect and find commonalities outside the office. Through the use of social media, individuals become better communicators, share in personal successes and build more positive community engagement. Friending your employees or boss on Facebook can help to humanize relationships, as you will have more insight into everyone’s lives.

Beyond Facebook, connecting with your boss on LinkedIn can be a strategic move. It may give you an opportunity to share your aspirations and highlight your strengths, the way you give back to the community, skills they’re unfamiliar with or ways in which you can leverage your connections. Following your boss’s feed will also give you insight into his or her interests and provide you with conversation starters for your office interactions.

When you connect through social media you enhance your “brand” by sharing things that matter to you. Because of this, you may want to clean up old personal information before connecting. By taking the time to remove posts that are irrelevant now, you are likely to become more confident with your online presence. Going forward, if you don’t want your boss to see something, you shouldn’t share it, but Facebook does have privacy functions that allow you to control what is visible to different audiences and who can see individual posts.

Check your privacy settings thoroughly and customize as needed. Remember: It’s not just about your posts; check photos you’re tagged in, old apps you may no longer use and old likes for groups or pages that may not be in alignment with your company’s culture.

If you do add your boss on social media, engage with him or her. Toss your boss a like, a nice comment, and even a share every now and then if you agree with something he or she has posted or shared. This can keep you top of mind if you work in a larger organization where you don’t get a lot of face time with your boss. C

POPULAR ARTICLES from sources such as Fast Company, Business Insider

and Forbes have cautioned employees and bosses about sending or accepting Facebook (FB) friend requests. This advice has typically highlighted the risks associated with loss of privacy and damage to reputation that could negatively affect and jeopardize an employee’s employment relationship or a boss’s objectivity in dealing with employee matters. These pieces offer sound advice, suggesting that employees and bosses should not friend each other, because (a)

information available and viewed on FB may lead to claims of discrimination or harassment; (b) negative posts and comments written about another employee, boss or leader in the organization may lead to a dismissal; and (c) friending some but not all employees may raise concerns of favoritism.

Central to the friending consideration is our understanding of social relationships as social minefields online. For example, evidence from exploratory field experiments—as reported in MIS Quarterly—shows that physical social networks and our assumptions about how they work may not translate and transfer to online social networks, possibly resulting in lost trust between an employee and their boss. Another study in the Academy of Management Journal shows evidence that FB becomes an “emotional echo chamber” that amplifies negative emotions when an adverse or disruptive event happens in the workplace and can lead to a heightened escalation of reactions that desta-bilizes the organizational dynamic.

Although some may argue that friending your boss on FB may serve to advance your social and economic capital at work, the evidence reveals that the transference of physical social relationships is far more unpredictable online.

Perhaps the best advice for employees and bosses is to keep professional relationships professional—relying, if necessary, on professional rather than personal networking sites. C