About 10% of Companies Have Fired Folks for Unauthorized Blogging
Mon Jul 23, 2007 11:02PM EDT
See Comments (19)
Blogging at work or, worse still, blogging about work? You probably know already that such behavior is frowned upon, but it could also get you shown to the door: A new study says that 9.1 percent of companies have fired people for violating policies about blogging or posting on message boards while on the job.
The study, from message monitoring company Proofpoint, also claims a whopping 27.6 percent of companies have fired people for violating the company's email policy and another 11 percent for violating a media sharing policy.
It's important to note that those statistics refer to the number of companies that have taken any action, not the number of workers who've been affected. If a company with 50,000 employees fires one person for unauthorized blogging, that would count the same as a company that fired its entire 20-person staff for the same reason. 308 companies were polled, indicating that 28 companies have terminated bloggers. (You can read the full study here, but you'll have to provide personal information to get it. It's full of additional statistics and data.)
While Wired's Threat Level blog is skeptical of that claim, it certainly doesn't seem outlandish to me. Has anyone at your place of business gotten the axe for blogging? Tell us about it here. We won't tell the boss, promise!
Related: Surf at Work to Get Yourself Fired
LINK: Nearly Ten Percent of Companies Have Fired Bloggers, Survey Claims
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2 Posted by ailshie7 on Tue Jul 31, 2007 5:10AM EDT Report Abuse
or downsize
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3 Posted by michaelshows on Tue Jul 31, 2007 10:47AM EDT Report Abuse
I doubt people were fired SOLEY for blogging. They probably were just not doing their work in general, and were fired mainly for sitting around blogging when there was work to be done. I know blogging is frowned upon wherever you work, but realistically, writing extraneous email or updating a blog on a slow day should not get you fired. A friend of a friend was fired from a decent job for blogging or emailing or whatever, but I asked my friend why she got axed. He said, "Basically because she never did any work."
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4 Posted by mscowan@rogers.com on Fri Sep 21, 2007 8:18AM EDT Report Abuse
Surveys in Canada show that the worst offenders when it comes to blogging and surfing are government employees. Since this category of worker is already considered an expert when it comes to wasting time on the job, there has to be a remedy available. Given the enormous array of technology available, surely employers can install a program which limits computer terminals to sites/programs which are work related. In any situation where an employee is required to open a site to purchase something legitimately connected with their job function, a manager would be required to override the restrictions. Blogging is a problem at work but so is surfing porn sites, downloading child porn and entering chat rooms. Government workers (and I am sure private sector workers as well) have been caught in these activities. We can clone a sheep, land on the moon and predict a tornado but we can't block an office worker from certain wwb sites. C'mon people - let's be serious!!
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5 Posted by mcdchaz on Sat Nov 3, 2007 2:19AM EDT Report Abuse
i work for a major ccompany ALL of our comps ar lockd down
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1 Posted by ne_vervoort on Tue Jul 31, 2007 1:05AM EDT Report Abuse
i feel that it is the company's fault for allowing them to get on to blog sites..they should be able to block those web sites from works and if the worker has time to go on to a blog site at work! Get some more work for them to do!! that means there job is to ----- easy!