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Story URL: http://management.silicon.com/careers/0,39024671,39126940,00.htm

Leader: Keep quiet about employee blogs
Or let the world know why your staff hate you

By silicon.com

Published: Monday 10 January 2005

News that Waterstone's has sacked an employee over blogging isn't the first and is unlikely to be the last such incident - but it serves to highlight how wrong businesses are getting it when dealing with employees' personal thoughts online.

Blogger Joe Gordon was fired for calling his boss 'evil' and referring to his employer as Bastardstone's on his website.

Now, this sort of language might not endear you to your higher-ups but should it really be a sacking offence?

If bosses handed out P45s every time a worker badmouthed his superiors after a hard day at the coal-face, there would be empty seats beyond number across the UK.

Gordon made a mistake when he let his occasionally less-than-complimentary thoughts be seen by other web users but his bosses messed up properly when they sacked him.

Doubtless, the management thought they were protecting the company's reputation when they sacked Gordon, but instead of stopping the blogging, Waterstone's gave Gordon free rein to talk about his experiences and ensure that even more people discovered his blog and found out precisely what the now ex-bookseller said about his bosses.

Had they taken Gordon to one side, asked him to cease writing about the company and to remove certain previous comments, Gordon told silicon.com he would have complied - and thus there would have been no resulting fuss.

Instead, the company have landed themselves with a huge amount of bad publicity.

Waterstone's, like most companies, has no policy regarding employee blogs, so it shouldn't be surprised that some, perhaps naïve, employees don't know where they stand when they write about their jobs on the web.

With the number of blog readers and writers growing at a stellar rate, and bloggers quickly building a reputation for saying what others dare not, this looks to be a problem that may crop up with even greater frequency in the future.

Instead of hauling a committed book fan with 11 years service under his belt across the coals, Waterstone's would have done well to have put the same employee resource into drafting a better code of conduct for its workforce - and making sure they knew about it.

For a company that makes a virtue of fighting censorship, to sack a man for a few barbed comments seems like overkill at best, and intellectual snobbery at worst.