Burden of Proof

A business law service posted an article regarding the risk of employee blogs to business. It discussed concerns regarding personal homepages (blogs) posing as potential “legal minefields” if not addressed properly. The issue revolves on employees working on their personal blogs before, during or after office hours (or perhaps when the boss isn’t looking). It enumerates the possible threats when employees disclose work, insolent co-workers, or share company/trade secrets through these channels.

A number of large businesses have experienced problems with these kinds of blogs and it is inevitable from the influx of technology that the internet is a favorable channel by which to serve as avenue for redress of grievances. Instead of mainly dismissing these as petty complaints, the company should rather view these as an outlet of criticism from the employees. Rather than deciding on when to fire blogger employees, the best action is to deal with the their pressing concerns.

Owners of large businesses should no longer be surprised in this technological trend. It is rather lack of insight on the part of the Management to believe that the internet is solely a tool to promote effective weblogs for communicating with customers and to merely propel marketing strategies to prospective customers. It is far more than that, boss.

This is most significantly true when you’ve given your employees good reason to despise an imaginary, slave-driver CEO or a supervisor with no balls. Employees are not primarily concern with revealing trade secrets, when there is actually none to divulge in the first place. Their main topics of interest concern their affairs, also known as “gripes” – the work load, salary, bloody damn officemates, slave-driving Management, lack of organizational structure, etc… That is the key step in understanding how these blogs work.

However, on a precautionary note, these schemes also raise the issue of how far an employer can dictate on the private life of their employees. It is one thing to regulate employee activities during working hours and definitely another issue when the actions take place out of working hours.

This paragraph is intended to boost the morale of the fearing employee regarding legal queries on blogging: It is the burden of the employers to prove that they have suffered loss as a consequence of an employee posting information on a blog than to take a defense of justifying dismissal due to it. Whether employers have a policy regarding this or not, a provision should clearly exist in their Employee Guidelines that constitute violation of such and such. Otherwise, it will be difficult for the company to justify their cause on these grounds claiming potential stance such as defamation.

It would be of interest to note for the employers that to post a blog, it does not need a deadline. On the contrary, it is rather available, up and running, ANYTIME.