Train Employees on the Appropriate Use of Social Media in Your Workplace

Tweet? Blog? Chat? Text? As the use of social media sites flourish – like Facebook®, Twitter® and LinkedIn® - organizations are increasingly putting their brand, reputation, bottom line and their employees at risk if they do not have a social media policy in place and an educated workforce who understand the do’s and don’ts of proper social media use during and after work hours.  

Because employees must be armed with good information in order to make good decisions, Global Compliance created the new Social Media and the Workplace online training course.  In less than 30 minutes, your employees will understand how their use of social media relates to and impacts confidentiality, intellectual property, harassment and respect for co-workers – as well as acceptable and ethical work performance that protects and supports your brand and your organization.

Unfortunately, most employees don’t understand that the ethics and compliance rules that apply in the physical world follow them into the virtual world regardless of whether they’re at work, home, or anywhere else they may be connected.  The risks to your organization’s brand, reputation, bottom line and employees are real and growing:

• Over 75% of employees are already using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for business purposes—up from 15 percent in 2007 (Awareness, Inc.)
• Nearly 20% of companies report that they have investigated the posting of confidential, sensitive or private information to a social network (Proofpoint)
• Approximately 8% of companies have terminated employees for organizational violations using social media (Proofpoint)

The first step in safeguarding your organization against the risks posed by social media use is teaching your employees what those risks are—and how to avoid them.  Global Compliance’s in-house team of ethics and compliance experts, including former Department of Justice lawyers, Chief Compliance Officers and seasoned attorneys with real world experience, developed the Social Media and the Workplace online training course to enable your employees to: 

• Learn about the concept of online social networking generally and how use of social media can affect the work environment
• Understand your organization’s position on the use of social media
• Understand that the values and rules that currently govern workplace behavior also apply to interactions online
  • Protect the organization’s confidential information
  • Be aware of intellectual property rights
  • Refrain from engaging in illegal or inappropriate behavior while using organizational resources—like harassment
• Learn how to use social media so that it does not interfere with an employee’s ability to do his or her job and represent himself or herself as an employee of the organization

Social Media and the Workplace is part of the new suite of online training courses designed to help organizations deal with an increasingly technologically savvy, fast-paced and global work environment: 

• Each course is designed to be less than 30 minutes, interactive and capable of being bundled to create a custom Code of Conduct training course. 
• Interactive tools to support and reinforce your training so that employees retain more – and ultimately comply more with your policies.  

• 508 compliant, making them accessible to people with disabilities. 
• Features the new Global Compliance Virtual 360^o creative platform which allows ultimate flexibility for organizations to tailor the course visuals quickly and cost-effectively.  The screenshots below display course images before and after personalization and branding are inserted.

• Offered in multiple languages to meet the needs of the global marketplace and Global Compliance’s existing client base which covers over 25 million employees in over 200 countries and territories.