TO FRIEND OR NOT TO FRIEND: THE FACEBOOK QUESTION
Kim Becnel
One of the most interesting results of the recent surge in the use of social media by people of all demographics is its tendency to blur the line between the professional and the personal. As a manager, you have to make a decision about where you stand in regards to this line. Often, the moment of truth comes when an employee sends you a Facebook Friend request. Should you accept? It depends.
THE BIG DECISION
A manager first needs to decide what his or her primary use of Facebook will be. If you want to be able to gripe about work or to communicate information to family and friends that is more personal than what you would feel comfortable sharing with employees (e.g., the scoop on your love life or the details of your latest medical procedure), then you should enact a no-Facebook-Friends-with-coworkers rule and stick to it. Making exceptions only muddies the waters and hurts people’s feelings. If you decide to keep your Facebook and work worlds separate, you need a standard reply ready to send when you get the inevitable requests from coworkers. It can be as simple as “Thanks so much for the Friend request. I’ve decided to reserve Facebook as a personal space to catch up with family and old friends, so I won’t be adding any coworkers to my Friends list.” You might choose to include your personal e-mail address or ask the declined friend to lunch to be sure he or she understands that your denial is not a personal rejection.
Deciding to keep people you supervise off your Friends list is a completely legitimate stance, and it is one that your coworkers will understand and respect if you apply it equally. However, it is also possible to use Facebook to communicate with old friends and family while building appropriately personal relationships with your staff members. The key is simply to remember who might be listening when you are “speaking.” Although this does introduce some limits, you can talk about more than the weather. You can discuss your hobbies, your pets, your pet peeves, your vacation, your favorite books, movies, and restaurants—pretty much anything you consider appropriate for the wide audience you have decided to allow. What you have to leave out: negative remarks about coworkers and your place of work in general and, perhaps, your political leanings (although this is up to you; you may be comfortable making your coworkers aware of your stance on various social issues).
CHALLENGES
If you do decide to allow folks you supervise into your Facebook universe, there are some definite potential challenges. Be aware of them in advance before you decide to Friend your coworkers and those you supervise, and think about how you would handle them should they arise.
Inappropriate Posts and the Dreaded De-Friending
There will likely be occasions in which a staff member posts a message you wish he or she had not posted. Let’s say, for instance, that a certain staff member you supervise writes something negative on your Facebook wall about another staff member you supervise. Perhaps the staff member thinks this is acceptable since the other staff member—the one being criticized—does not have a Facebook account, or at least does not have one that his coworkers know about. In this situation, you would need to write a private message to the complaining staff member, informing her that her post was inappropriate and that you had to delete it. Some staff members would understand, and you could then continue your Facebook friendship; others, however, might have their feelings hurt and remove you from their Friends list. And don’t think it doesn’t sting to be de-Friended. In any case, you should be prepared to let your staff know if they cross any lines and to endure a de-Friending, or even initiate one, if necessary.
Finding Out Things You’d Really Rather Not Know
Although you may have decided to operate within certain boundaries when you accepted Friend requests from coworkers, be aware that they did not necessarily make the same considered decision. Be prepared to find out things about your staff you may really rather not know. Let’s say, for example, you are fairly liberal-leaning when it comes to politics. How will you react when you discover that an employee, or two or three, hold very conservative stances? How will you respond when you teach classes on diversity and cultural sensitivity, and the same staff members who seem to understand you perfectly in class go home and post Facebook statuses that say things like, “For English, press one. If you don’t speak English, hang up and call back when you do.” Will you be able to evaluate this employee’s on-the-job attitude and performance objectively? If not, you may want to reconsider adding employees to your Friends list.
BENEFITS
If you can successfully negotiate the challenges, thoughtful use of Facebook can increase your managerial effectiveness by cultivating positive, and still professional, relationships with employees.
Easy Socialization with Employees
If you are one of those people who finds it impossible to get the members of your department together outside of work, you might find Facebook to be a wonderful tool for some basic socialization. Facebook can facilitate the kind of chatting you might do at the yearly picnic—you know, the one that no one in your department (except you) attends. You can admire pictures of pets and kids, send get-well wishes, commiserate when it is too cold, rainy, hot. Especially if you supervise staff members you do not often see in person, you may find this a most welcome opportunity to show an interest in the lives of your employees and a concern for their welfare. Revealing humanizing (not humiliating) things about yourself further establishes this connection, allowing your employees to show interest in and concern for you.
Publicizing Library Events
If you have a large circle of library Friends, you can send them short promotional posts for upcoming programs. Your Friends can easily hit “share” and repost these items to their own pages to help spread the word.
Now, should you Friend your Mom? I’m afraid that’s another discussion entirely.