Branding protect: "Firing For Online Behavior" By June D. Bell

This article discusses how a negative social media post about a company can affect an employee in the workplace. There have been many cases of employees attacking companies on online platforms about leadership behaviors, working conditions and many other manners of the organization. In some instances, some of these employees have been terminated in to order for the companies to protect their branding. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) advised employers about firing their employees for their misconduct, an alternative should be in a play to settle these types of situations.

The rules that have been overseeing social media are constantly changing and it has been a challenge finding ways to control this certain behavior.

Article Analysis

Back when I was working at the Onward Beach Resort as a server, this is one of the topics the HR department emphasized on during my orientation. According to the HR consultant, if you are going to talk negative about the company on social media, keep both the company’s name and the person or people involved out. After reading the article, I can see the purpose of monitoring employees when they are off duty, especially with their social networking outlets. I understand that it is an invasion of privacy, but in order to keep business with the company going, the employer has to protect the branding. Terminating an employee over one negative comment on their Facebook about the company is a bit extreme, but rather find an alternate to discipline these offenses. Going back to Onward, if an employee was found posting bad things about the company, they will have to go under an investigation and then follow through with the final decision made by the HR.

Author’s Credibility

June Bell, the author of the article is a subject matter expert for employment issues, which is why she is given maximum points. She has written a few articles and blogs on the SHRM website that had great reviews from members. Since she is both an HR professional and journalist, although majority of her work are opinionative, she does have the resources to fall back to. The fact that she blogs about major discrepancies, it does shine light as to how HR consultants can improve their methods for the organization.

Information/Content

Bell did a great job writing the content of the article and since it is the most recent, I decided to give maximum points. Everything on the article had a steady flow and there was graphs and other illustrations presented to provide visuals. I appreciate how she kept the information gearing towards one topic and expanding in depth with it rather than talking about multiple relatable topics and having the readers confused. This is indeed a great way to raise awareness as to how organizations are constantly changing, and we need more articles like to provide us with this kind of information.

Structure & Format

Although the article is great, in order to get access to it, you have to be an official SHRM member. There should not have to be any restrictions for reading articles about anything that relates to the things happening in today’s society. Other than that, it is reader friendly, most of the content can be easily understood and Bell did elaborate a lot on the topic. Formality wise, she provided an abstract, introduction and conclusion to create a well-organized article.

Site & Access

As I mentioned before the article is only available if you are SHRM member, which does not make it a reliable source if nonmembers do not have access to it. Other than that, since I have been using the SHRM website, it is easy to navigate. Finding current articles, on the other hand, still is an issue with me looking at the latest concerns. Coming from my previous Internet Review, I did say that a there’s not much current news that happens weekly. It usually takes about two weeks for recent news to be published and this is why I have trouble finding articles for the Internet Reviews.

Purpose & Other

Although the article had minor problems on structure and website, overall, I liked the article. June Bell’s goal was to inform her audience on how effective social media is and she hit her target. As business students, this is the kind of information we should be learning because it all relates to organizational behavior. There’s a lot of good information here that we can utilize for our future references if ever we encounter this type of misconduct. Although the class is a mixture of different business concentrations, at some point we are going to be place at a management position where we have to make decisions and enforce policies for situation like this.