Grip tightening on what you can say about employers on the Internet?

According to an article from The Guardian, firms and employment tribunals are finally getting to grips with social networking, in that many companies now have a social media/blogging policy as part of their contractual terms with employees, as well as employment tribunals recently upholding a number of dismissals against employees for gross misconduct relating to blogging about work.

Game over?

Personally, I doubt it, but it will have some affect on what employees write on their Facebook or blog.

In my view this is just more evidence of employers punishing people for the problems they create in the first, i.e. employers manage people badly, the employee has few ways to complain about the employer, the employer finds out and disciplines the employee.

Britain will struggle to emerge from recession if British employers keep leaning on law makers to keep changing employment law to suit their own interests.

For more details see How your Facebook status could put you out of work by Philip Landau.

Work blog becomes TV comedy drama

According to the Independent a work blog has been turned into a TV comedy drama.

The blog in question is Random Acts of Reality.

The blog is now defunct (or on hiatus?) and written by Brian Kellet.

The TV drama is called Sirens and will be first transmitted on Channel 4 at 10 p.m. Monday 27 June.

Brief details from Channel 4: A team of world-weary paramedics are forced to confront the dregs of society - not to mention their own inadequacies.

For a good introduction/overview of Sirens see Is blogging really the stuff of great drama? by Gerard Gilbert.

The work blogger and a World Cup campaign

According to The Times today England's chances of landing the 2018 World Cup has been dealt a severe blow by a work blogger!

Some details:

The first indications that a storm was brewing were made public more than a month ago.

But only the most eagle-eyed internet observer would have stumbled across the anonymous blog post.

“I am a single thirtysomething from London,” it began.

“I have been working as a Whitehall civil servant since 2002.”

What followed were claims that the author was friends with a former Labour minister.

“Mr T” worked in a “high-profile position”.

Yesterday it emerged that Mr T was in fact Lord T — David Triesman — the chairman of the Football Association.

What was more, the blogger, Melissa Jacobs, had secretly taped the peer, also the head of England’s 2018 World Cup bid, making a series of ill-judged remarks that swiftly became his undoing.

See Melissa Jacobs: the civil servant blogger with ‘beautiful eyes’.

Would you "out" a work blogger?

This is the dilemma set out in "Work ethics" - a feature of The Guardian's Saturday Work supplement.

More details:

I've discovered an 'anonymous' work blog which I'm sure is all about our office.

Events match up uncannily and while no one's identified, people have been given recognisably rude nicknames.

I'm pretty sure I know who's behind it, but I haven't made it public yet.

How should I handle this?

If you know what you would do, click on this link and leave a comment or email the editor.

Work blogging and business opportunities

According to Huma Qureshi of The Guardian, "Blogging can be a way to air your feelings about your job, but if it clicks with the public's imagination it can lead to new business opportunities and book deals".

For more details see Bloggers are the authors of their own destiny.

Another doctor of work blogging

Late last year I blogged about Abigail Schoneboom who did a PhD on the subject of work blogging - see here.

Just today (via Google alerts) I heard of another PhD on the subject of work blogging.

It's by Lilia Efimova.

However, this PhD looks at work blogging in quite a different way than Abigail or myself, i.e. workers using blog to express passion, rather than frustration with employment.

Click here for a summary of Lilia's work.

To view a copy of the whole piece of work - Passion at work: Blogging practices of knowledge work - click here.

Blogging on the front line

Work blogging a la Francais

In yesterday's Times (2 supplement) there was an article on a very popular French work blog - Les Tribulations D'une Caissere (also see left).

It tells the tale of how the witty observations of a French checkout girl have become an international bestseller.

Some details:

Her name is Anna Sam and she worked in a French supermarket for almost a decade, smiling at shoppers but receiving little besides insults and disdain in return.

She witnessed behaviour ranging from the loathsome to the lustful - queue-jumping, cheating, thieving, moaning and sometimes a quick fondle between the meat and the cheese counter.

She put up with self-important managers watching the staff from behind a one-way mirror, a salary of €680 (£605) a month and the orange polyester jacket that she had to wear.

She would often joke with other checkout girls that someone should write a book about their plight.

For more details see The checkout girl: abused, ignored and on a till near you (Adam Sage).

The blog is, as you would expect in French, but if you read the Time's article you'll see some translated examples.

Work blogging at the South by Southwest Interactive 2009?

Zoe Margolis at Girl With A One-track Mind has just announced that she intends to front a panel on work blogging at next year's SXSW Interactive festival.

A summary of the proposal is as follows:

From anonymously whistle-blowing on your money-grabbing, corrupt colleagues in the Stock Exchange, to taking your employers to court when they fire you for blogging, ‘outed’ British sex-blogger Girl with a one-track mind moderates a panel to find out: have bloggers now got the upper hand?

With an outstanding and unique panel of British speakers, Bloggers: You’re Fired! will explore whether it is possible to combine blogging, anonymity and work – and how you can whistle-blow without getting caught.

This inimitable panel is exceptionally positioned to talk about these issues: each speaker brings a wealth of personal experience and professional expertise to this topic.

All speakers run high-traffic, popular, award-winning blogs, and, in addition, all have published a best-selling book that is based on their blog.

For more details see here.

New research paper on work-related blogs

It's literally just off the press.

The title is: Unmediated workplace images from the Internet: An investigation of work blogging

A summary of the paper is:

The paper addresses the deficit in our understandings of the growing phenomenon of work blogging.

Work blogging is investigated in the context of developing Internet communication technologies, almost blanket use of the Internet by the youngest cohort of workers, and changing Internet application.

The approach involves content analysis of postings taken from a sample of 744 work-related blogs and qualitative questionnaire data from 204 work bloggers.

The findings support the many views taken of work blogging put forward by media reporters and the scatterings of blog-related research currently available.

The findings also explore self-reports of work bloggers, which conflict to an extent with how work-related blogs are viewed by other interested parties.

The paper dwells on the future of work with a call for wider research to investigate whether rapidly developing and easy to apply Internet communication technologies can augment human powers of organization and integration.

You can download it here.

My presentation slides can be found here.

Some work-related blog statistics

Two years ago I sent out a questionnaire to about 500 people who blogged about their work.

I got back just over 200.

For a number of reasons I've sat on the data for nearly 18 months.

So, for those who may find it interesting to know why some people have chosen work as the theme of their blog, what motivated them to start blogging about work, what motivates them to continue blogging about work, and, who tends to be the audience for work-related blogs, here goes...

Figure one: Why do you blog specifically about work?



Figure two: What motivated you to start blogging?



Figure three: What motivates you to continue blogging about your work?



Figure four: Who reads your blog?

I should have a full working paper that discusses these findings available some time next week.

It discusses work blogging as a single phenomenon and then against a wider trend in Internet application.

Work-related blogs as creative resistance

Work-related blogs get quite a bit of attention in the popular media and last year saw three (that I know of) turned in to books.

Last week while Googling around for any further reports or mention of "work-related blogs", "employee blogs", "job blogs", "workblogging", etc. I came across an interesting piece of work on this very matter by Abigail Schoneboom.

The working paper is called Diary of a Working Boy: Creative Resistance Among Anonymous Workbloggers and can be downloaded here.

It's particularly ironic for myself as I'm just about in the final stages of finishing my second working paper (really a better version of the first!) on work-related blogs, for a conference in Amsterdam next month - a paper that I will put on-line after I've presented it.

A quick summary of the study follows:

...the study aims to understand the intersection between workblogging, creative writing, and social change, capturing the appeal of humdrum office jobs to aspiring writers and activists who pursue their emancipation clandestinely within the organisation.

I particularly like a further line from the abstract:

In an era where employers increasingly seek to improve worker productivity by nurturing a strong organisational culture based on informal bonds and self-management, workbloggers use their writing to buffer themselves against the company’s attempt to secure their hearts and minds, making fun of management gurus and celebrating ways to reclaim time while appearing to be hard at work.

Well worth a read!