It seems crazy to me to try to regulate technology and communications in the workplace.

My recommendations to organisations are simple:

• Have a social media guideline about what you can and cannot do at work.
• Hold employees to a measurable standard for performance on the job.
• Implement a digital marketing and communications training initiative.

The social media guideline should list a specific simply set of policies and these must be include face-to-face conversations, presentations at events, email, social media, online forums, blogs and other forms of communications (but don’t try to ban a specific set of social media technologies), in this guide also include some important contact details from your marketing and communication team.

Simple social media guideline:

• Employees can’t sexually harass anyone nor publish sexual content
• They can’t disclose secrets
• They can’t use internal information to trade stock
• They shouldn’t speak ill about ill of the competition
• They must be transparent and provide their real name when communicating

About the performance of the staff, as long as your employees get their work done in a satisfactory manner, there should be no need to regulate their minute-to-minute behaviour, if you have individual cases of people not getting their jobs done in a satisfactory manner, deal with that problem talking with them to understand the cause (e.g. specific personal problem, the person is not right for the job (lack of competences) or the person has not been integrated in the team yet) and then set an action/corrective plan, objectives and deadline.

As part of a corporate initiative, you can developed and implement a training programme that focuses on the latest in digital marketing and communications.

I want to share a conversation between David Meerman Scott and Vivienne Storey, General Manager of BlandsLaw, a boutique law firm specialising in Australian employment law. David asked the following questions to Vivienne:

• How do you work to convince CEOs and the legal staff that social media is worth the risk?
• What do companies need within their social media guidelines?
• Should the guidelines be made public?