Ethical Dilemma: Should The Hiring Resources Monitor Our Social Media?

📌Category: Entertainment, Ethics, Psychology, Social Media
📌Words: 779
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 17 June 2022

The employment and workplace environment must be safe for all employers. Safety is the top factor for employment, as well as everything else. Employers have the right to feel safe while performing their tasks at the workplace; no one would doubt that. People can question whether employers should or should not monitor social media. So, this social media, a powerful tool for communication around the globe. Social media has everything in its database. Whatever people post, comment, share, forward, or react to is available permanently, even after account deletion. I can say that social media has everything about us—it works as an identity checker. You can gather numerous information about a person after visiting their Facebook profile. For that reason, human resources (HR) look at the social media accounts of people they are interviewing. There are many disturbances in that manner, and privacy concerns are at the top. There are also many vulnerabilities on the company for not tracking social media activities, such as harming the company’s reputation on purpose, which would lead to severe issues for that company. From there, an ethical dilemma arises. Taking both sides has negatives, but I believe that taking one side is a better course of action. Therefore, I argue that companies must track and monitor employees’ social media activities.

Many people consider monitoring employees’ social media activities a violation of privacy, allowing companies to ensure they have an excellent reputation. In this ethical dilemma, I believe that monitoring employees’ social media is better than the choice of not monitoring. I think that the company’s safety comes first, and once a company is safe, all the employees will be safe too. Helen Lam, from Athabasca University, in Edmonton, Canada, explains the following survey result:

“A 2009 American Management Association/The ePolicy Institute survey of 586 US companies found 89 per cent of employees admittedly had used the office system to send ‘jokes, gossip, rumors or disparaging remarks’ to outsiders; and 9 per cent had used company e-mail to send ‘sexual, romantic or pornographic text or images’ (The ePolicy Institute, 2009)” (Lam 426).

When employees send gossip, rumors, and disparaging remarks’ to contacts outside the company, that automatically sends an unprofessional picture about the corporation they work for. Eighty-nine percent is a critical level! All the employees do that, not knowing that this action hurts the company. When the company tracks this kind of activity, it saves itself from a vast scandal that might or might not damage its profit; it is a possibility, but it is worth preventing it. I ensure that this action, checking employees’ online activities, is better than not checking, despite the discomforts it causes. Things might go out of control when not checking online activities, like a scandal or customer loss due to negative feedback from an employee. In other words, I am positive that watching out for social media activities from employees is safer for the company than not watching them, knowing that this step cause worries about privacy.

Another reason I am choosing and supporting monitoring employees’ social media posts and comments is because it protects companies’ confidential information against leakage. The last thing a company CEO wants to hear is confidential information exposure. Although employees consider looking at their media accounts as privacy abuse, looking at their media accounts might prevent a more considerable misuse that might happen to the business. A survey result showing confidential information exposure by percentage says, “Another survey by the American Management Association found 14 per cent of employees had sent e-mails to outsiders containing confidential company information (Mello, 2012)” (Lam 426). A small portion of employees might cause the most massive damage to the company they are working at. Sharing confidential information with strange contacts allows for unauthorized access.

For example, evil hackers are thriving to steal any confidential information to provoke a company in exchange for benefit (usually money). Saving the time and effort on the hackers or others “sending” confidential information is a poor choice; the only thing that will happen next is the company’s threat. Again, sending confidential materials to untrusted people opens a window to exploitation and threats. So, I can say that auditing and checking employees’ incoming and received content prevents classified data from falling into the wrong hands.

In conclusion, choosing between tracking employees’ social media accounts or not, I choose to track the employees’ online accounts. As stated earlier, the cause of my choice is because it protects the company’s reputation and prevents leaking confidential information. I understand that this choice is widely unacceptable to people, but I chose it since it benefits both the company and the employees. The employees would not be in a good status if they had their job at a poor company. In contrast, when the employee works in a company with an excellent reputation and continuous customers, that company is in perfect condition. Therefore, the employee’s status will more likely be okay. This difference highlights the importance of my choice. Although privacy matters, having a healthy work environment is more important. Should the hiring resources monitor our social media? Yes, they must.

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