Tag Archives: rules

Are you using your own smartphone or other devices in your work or volunteering activities? Is your employer aware?

images meant to look like cave drawings, one of a woman using a smartphone and one at a desktop computer.

Do you use your own, personal smartphone in your work activities for your employer? Does your company reimburse you for this? Does your company have a policy in writing about this use? Are you facing any challenges in using your own tech resources for your work, tech that you pay for and maintain yourself and use for your personal life as well?

I started a thread on the TechSoup forum a while back about this and a lot of folks have some strong feelings about this issue. There are also some companies that reimburse staff for use of their own personal devices.

What about your company? And for nonprofit organizations – do you realize what the cost is for your staff and volunteers when you require them to use their smartphones and other personal devices in their work for you? Had you even thought about it before?

You can weight in on the comments below, but please also weigh in on the original TechSoup forum.

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Before you create that online profile… do you want to keep it?

Each time you create a profile on any service — Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, whatever – you have to use an email address for that profile.

Choose that email address carefully, because it could determine whether or not you get to keep that profile once you leave your organization or agency.

More and more, staff members across organizations – not just the marketing department – are creating online profiles and participating in online groups and social media as a part of their work. An organization’s IT staff might be participating on the TechSoup Community to talk about their approaches to choosing hardware or tools to ensure system security. An agency’s human resources staff may be on an online community for other HR managers, to discuss the latest legislation and court rulings affecting the workplace. An agency’s program director may be on Facebook and Twitter to interact with people participating the agency’s services, classes, whatever.

When that staff member leaves the organization or agency, the tech waters can get quite muddy over who owns those online profiles. Often, it’s not the content of the profile that determines who owns such – it’s what email address was used to register that profile.

If there is any chance you will want to keep any online profile after you leave an organization, don’t register that profile using your organization’s email address.

In an article by Society for Human Resource Management, entitled, Ownership of Social Media Accounts Should Be Clarified in Agreements, Jim Thomas, an attorney with Minor & Brown in Denver (whose No Funny Lawyers Blog has been listed as one of the top 25 U.S. business law blogs according to LexisNexis) offers advice regarding company ownership of employee online activities. He notes in that article:

The clearest case for employer ownership will be an employee who uses other employees to maintain his or her accounts,” Thomas stated. “Beyond that, indicators will be use of employer e-mail addresses, employer standardized or coordinated formats (this is what your page should look like) or approaches to social media (coordinated campaigns); employer-provided photos and/or content; employer-provided passwords or passwords that are shared with the employer; employees who are allowed to use employer computers to use social media during working hours. Not that any one of these or even all of them will be dispositive.

The best advice is to have frank conversations with your supervisor, and to get clear policies from senior management, regarding who owns employee social media activities, and how accounts will be handled if you depart the organization. And you will have to have more such conversations and agreements every time your supervisor or senior staff changes, if policies aren’t in writing.