Today, a fellow online community manager from a partner company asked an interesting question: how has your company addressed the relationship between internal communities and company policies? It so happens that this was a topic of discussion at a recent conference I attended in San Jose, CA. At Blog Well, organized by Gaspedal and BlogCouncil, there was a session on disclosure and policy. While the focus was primarily on employee blogging on company websites (external or internal), in my opinion, the same principles apply to online communities.
With respect to employee conduct and company policy, I don't think it makes a difference whether your community is internal or external. I think your online community policy should simply be your company's business conduct guidelines extended to the web, i.e. community & blog policy should be the same as corporate conduct policy. (Of course, "disclosure" also involves revealing necessary truths when employees interact with external parties (customers, partners, etc.).
But I won't get into that. There is a great "disclosure toolkit" featured on the BlogCouncil's Website - it's free and a good starting point for newbies.)
Let's take my company's nine-page Business Conduct Guidelines, for example. The high-level themes are pretty generic. One would be hard-pressed to argue that they do not cover what you would need to prevent abuse within your internal communities, or to govern employee conduct on external communities:
- Act with integrity
- Obey the law and <Company Name> policy
- Comply with the Antitrust laws
- Do not engage in insider trading
- Protect <Company Name>'s confidential and proprietary information
- Handle the trade secrets and confidential information of others with care
- Do not give or accept questionable gifts
- Avoid conflicts of interest
- Treat fellow <Company Name> employees with dignity and respect
- Be honest and trustworthy when dealing with customers and vendors
- Comply with <Company Name>'s contract signature policy
- Do not misuse <Company Name>'s property or equipment
- Comply with <Company Name>'s Information Technology policies
- Maintain and provide accurate business records and financial reports
- Ensure full, fair, accurate, timely and understandable disclosure and financial reporting
- Do not improperly influence the conduct of an audit
- Comply with applicable laws and and guidelines regarding Record Retention
Failure to comply could subject you to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, yada, yada, yada.
You get the point. Either you can link to an online version of your company guidelines (that every employee already agreed to at time of hiring), or you can extract the most relevant clauses and create a "Terms of Use" page on your community. You can check out our example (VMware Communities), which is primarily used for external-facing forums and blogs, although there are certain employee-only forums that are private, mainly used by professional services. These terms apply to non-employee and employee members alike; however, employees are held to the higher standards of company policy.
What do you think?
Hi,
The general opinion is that internal communities should be covered by existing company policies. They should be written to address behavior and not the method. The same behavior should generate the same response whether I use email, telephone, blog, etc. As part of joining a company, you agree to the policies.
It would be interesting to find out if the discussion around policies is really about the fear of what people will say and do given. The fact that the policy folks overlook is the power of the community to self regulate.