How criticizing your company on Facebook can cost you your job
By Dave Parrack
Social networking is on the increase. Most of us use at least one of the big ones to keep in touch with friends and share with them what’s going on in our lives. But beware of of what you say, because it could potentially cost you your job.
All of us who use social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, do so knowing that there’s a chance that what we say could be seen by hundreds of people. Friends talk, gossip gets passed around, and bitching is almost a national sport.
However, you should surely have the freedom to say what you want on one of these sites, as long as it stays within the bounds of the law. Obviously defaming someone could be pushing it a little, but is saying you’re bored at work really grounds for dismissal?
That’s exactly what happened to 16-year-old Kimberley Swann from Essex, England. She started a new job at Ivell Marketing & Logistics as an office administrator, and unfortunately found the work a bit dull.
According to The Daily Telegraph, over the course of the three weeks that she was employed at the firm, she updated her Facebook with a few references to her job. After the first day she said, “first day at work. omg (oh my God)!! So dull!!”. A couple of days later, she said, “all i do is shred holepunch n scan paper!!! omg!”. Then two weeks in, she moaned, “im so totally bord!!!”
The first thing that crosses my mind when reading those Facebook updates is how she ever got a job with English as bad as that. But that’s not what flashed across the minds of the company’s bosses when they were first told of the nature of the updates.
Swann was hauled into her boss’s office and fired for the comments she’d made on Facebook. This is despite her not having mentioned the company name in any of the updates and having said nothing worse than she was bored.
This isn’t the first time a company has fired employees for comments made on Facebook. In October, 2008, Virgin Atlantic fired 13 cabin crew for making comments about passengers. But this is worse in a way because it was one single employee making the sorts of comments that all of us make to our friends down the pub after work.
It could have been worse – there was a case of a Facebook profile change leading to murder. But the funny thing in this case is that the company has now been named and shamed in national newspapers and all over the Web. If they’d just let the comments be, no one would ever have known Swann was badmouthing them.
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Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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February 28th, 2009
It often crosses my mind that some of those random comments you see on twitter could cost someone their job.
February 28th, 2009
Most people who hate their job so much as to publicly deride it would just quit and find employment more to their liking. Oh, what, at 16 she is somehow entitled to a better job? Come on, what job skills dies she think sHe really has at 16? That the company helped her out of her poor situation doesn’t hurt my feelings in the least.
March 2nd, 2009
“Swann was hauled into her boss’s office and fired for the comments she’d made on Facebook. This is despite her not having mentioned the company name in any of the updates and having said nothing worse than she was bored. ”
More likely, it’s showing her attitude. Productive workers find things to improve themselves, and are a bit more mature than to criticise their employer for something of their making. If all she can do is waste time on facebook, what are they employing her for?