Social networking and employee identities Essay

Social networking and employee identities - Essay Example For example, when used for recruitment purposes social networking sites may fail to meet all the necessary security requirements. In the workplace, where social networking is often used for promoting the communication between employees, similar security problems have appeared. The risks of social networking in regard to a particular security issue, the identity of its users, are explored in this paper. Reference is made, especially, to the identities of employees, as users of the social networking sites. The literature review related to this issue verifies the extensive use of social networking sites, as a tool of communication, in the workplace and the involvement of these sites in the hiring process. Also, the studies published in this field indicate the failures of social networking sites to offer to their users full protection of their identities. 2. Social Networking and Employee Identities Social networking sites are extensively used in the workplace. In the past, employees acc essed these sites just for entertainment reasons (Timm 2010). Today, social networking sites are officially used in the workplace for a variety of purposes: a) for improving the communication between employees in various organizational departments, b) for helping to the sharing of documents and other material between employees; the performance of e-mail in regard to such service can be low as problems in the central servers of the e-mail providers are common; c) for developing critical organizational activities; reference should be made, as examples, to the marketing and recruitment processes (Timm 2010). On the other hand, the benefits of social networking for organizations cannot be doubted. Indeed, social media can help businesses to improve their market image, to increase their customer base and to improve their communication with their customers (Society for Human Resource Management 2012). In addition, through social media employees are able to share their ideas and their conc erns in regard to the tasks assigned to them (Society for Human Resource Management 2012). However, in firms where employees use social media, the exposure of IT systems to various threats is quite high (Society for Human Resource Management 2012). The disadvantages of the use of social media, as related to the workplace could be described as follows: a) increased risk for ‘virus attacks and online scams’ (Society for Human Resource Management 2012), b) potential damages on organization’s reputation, a problem that usually results from the negative comments of employees in social networking sites (Society for Human Resource Management 2012) and c) decrease of employee performance; such problem exists in case that employees spend a lot of time ‘in updating their online profile’ (Society for Human Resource Management 2012). According to a survey published in 2011, currently a high percentage of employers, about 48.3% allow to their employees the use of social networking sites in work, even for non-business use (Fisher 2011, Figure 1, Appendices). It should be noted that a percentage of 25% of employers, a rather high percentage, prohibits any access to social media in work if the use is not made for covering business needs. On the other hand, a high percentage of employers, about 70.7% prefer to adjust the IT systems in the workplace so that the access to social networking