
Your Employee Is an Online Celebrity. Now What Do You Do?  - nikunjk
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578003082273743230.html
======
h2s

        > Co-branded employees should get some workday time for
        > activities that support the company's goals. But
        > setting limits on those activities, along with clear
        > expectations for what else these employees need to
        > accomplish, can help ensure that they complete their
        > primary work and avoid resentment from their
        > nonblogging, nontweeting colleagues.
    

The paternalism of this remark is mindblowing. It reads like advice for
parents whose children like videogames. Nobody in any job I've ever had has
had to explicitly "set limits" on things because part of the point of hiring
somebody is that you ensure that you think they're a responsible grown-up who
can be trusted to work hard. I don't see why that would suddenly change if I
happened to have a blog with thousands of readers.

~~~
tensor
Absolutely true. But equally, don't expect special treatment if you are
blogging instead of producing. If your blogging overlaps with work interests,
it becomes even more complicated, especially if part of your job becomes
blogging for work.

All this paragraph means is that if you put your blogging ahead of your job,
you shouldn't be too surprised by pushback or even being let go. Every
relationship is two ways, and if you honour your employment agreement you
should be fine. Though I understand not all employers may think that way.

~~~
mattmanser
Ugh, I really hope you're not a manager. This sort of infantile world view is
why I'm so glad I'm self-employed now.

Let your employees determine their own work.

~~~
Nursie
And if they're not working because all they do is blog?

~~~
stephencanon
Then you fire them for the cause of not doing their work. You don't fire them
because they were blogging.

~~~
michaelochurch
The subtext here is that companies are afraid of employees becoming hard-to-
fire based on out-of-job credibility. We could see 6-month severances being
the norm (at least for so-called "co-branded" people) in a few years.

Credibility used to come from job titles, references, and performance reviews.
It came only from people that companies hand-picked to be "managers". This
meant that a person could be fired for any reason and the company could call
it "performance" and that person had zero credibility. They held all the
cards. The result was that companies could treat people (not only those they
fired, but those they kept but could threaten with termination) badly.

That era's ending, and good riddance.

~~~
Nursie
Actually there are a number of subtexts here, I can think of several which are
less cut and dried -

    
    
      - Employee wasting company time.
      - Employee divulging too much about company mechanisms and/or IP.
      - Ownership of IP (content) created during company time.
      - Ownership of blog/tweet followings gathered on company time.
    

These are real issues for a company and some bring up big questions about who
owns an employee's paid output.

~~~
michaelochurch
Employees shouldn't be blogging on company time (except on a company blog,
where the IP issues are unambiguous). I don't think it's unethical, because
most companies no longer seriously invest in employees' career advancement, so
employees have to sneak away time for that, and everyone successful "steals" a
lot of education. I do think it's sloppy and reckless to perform side work
_you actually intend to use_ on company time. If you are going to go ahead and
do it, at least show you're not a total fucking moron by turning off
timestamps.

I understand that it's annoying if you suspect someone's "wasting company
time", but I the larger issue that people have with this is mostly
irrespective of whether the blogging happens during work hours, especially as
those become increasingly vague in definition. The issue, for the Baby Boomer
clientele of WSJ, is that it punctures the illusion that people are supposed
to keep that they're 100% dedicated to the corporate goals and working as hard
as they can. (If you have side projects, even if they occur outside of work,
they will decrease short-term work performance from a manager's perspective.
If you work 80 hours per week in total and give your boss 40, what you're
actually giving is worth 25-30, tops, because of the per-hour productivity
slide.)

Baby Boomers had to put forward an image of total loyalty: no side projects,
no interest in independent credibility, happy to work on whatever they were
assigned to do. Millennials don't buy into that, not in the least. They put
their careers ahead of management's objectives and it shows, and it's making a
lot of people angry, but it's a rational response to a new economic reality.

~~~
yuhong
"Employees shouldn't be blogging on company time (except on a company blog,
where the IP issues are unambiguous). "

Of course, that is only a workaround. As you described later, the issues in
the long term need to be resolved properly.

------
abalashov
_Younger employees show up on the job with an existing social-media presence,
which they aren't about to abandon—especially since they see their personal
brands lasting longer than any single job or career._

This seems like a rather biased formulation. It's not because they're a bunch
of arrogant little Millenial shits. They're responding to the collapse of the
bilateral social contract between companies and career employees that was said
to have traditionally existed, in their parents' generation and so on. In
other words, this is reactive. A few years is the most you can hope to get out
of any company now, not a lifelong career.

That's not the Millenials' fault. They didn't ask for that.

~~~
nmcfarl
Minor niggle: Not their parents’ generation, maybe their grandparents’.

Some one who’s 20 today, and entering the workforce, would have been born in
’92. In ’92 lifelong single employer employment was well dead.

I see comments like this (and the WSJ’s) a bit, and it amazes me how slowly
awareness of cultural changes percolate in to the mainstream. I’m nearing 40
and _my parents_ didn’t expect life long employment. (Though they clearly
desired it and went big time for stable employers: Banks, academia,
government.)

~~~
jpdoctor
Just to try and pinpoint the time frame: I'm 48, my dad worked the same place
for 35 years. He made comments about seeing the implied-employment structure
break down during his time.

It probably had a lot to do with the failure of unions, but that's just my
guess.

~~~
nicholas73
I read it had to do with the corporate raider buyouts of the 80's. Companies
discovered that they could shed liabilities to employees this way. It also
probably is due to it being easier to hire employees at far off locations.
Further since college became more prevalent and often vocational by major,
companies did not need to invest in training the employee, making them easier
to replace.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _I read it had to do with the corporate raider buyouts of the 80's.
> Companies discovered that they could shed liabilities to employees this
> way._

I was around for the LBO bubble and the days of Michael Milken, and I'd
probably argue even that was a consequence of the neutering of unions: If the
unions had still been powerful (and perhaps less corrupt), they would have
struck at the first company they could. By making an example of one company,
perhaps bankrupting it, they could have scared off future LBO attempts.

Of course, greasing the palms of a few union leaders likely occurred during
some of those LBOs. Perhaps the union model requires having saints for
leaders, so add it to the list of why unions failed.

~~~
yuhong
I think part of the problem was the usage of stocks for retirement.

------
noonespecial
tl;dr : Bad news BigCo, you can't own your employee's entire lives anymore.

Its starting to feel like the whole notion of "employee" is fading fast. We're
contractors now, all of us, and we are our own brand.

~~~
Natsu
You say that as if companies won't find a way to take over:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/court-taking-
over...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/court-taking-over-
employees-social-media-account-a-ok-under-cfaa/)

~~~
donaldc
_You say that as if companies won't find a way to take over:_

Some of them will try, from time to time, but they will largely fail. Though
to be on the safe side, don't share your social networking account passwords
with anyone at the company you work for..

------
paulsutter
This article is so east coast. Next thing you know the WSJ might have an
article saying that some young people are questioning the need for business
cards!

------
pcrh
I can't help but feel that this issue has been addressed long ago in the
context of patents.

If as an employee you invent something that is related to your normal job
activities, then it is deemed the property of your employer. So a travel agent
tweeting airline deals should be considered to be doing their job, and if they
are better than their colleagues, then indeed they should get a raise (unless
they are sending customers towards a competitor, in which case they get
fired). The same person tweeting about racing cars would not be deemed to be
doing employment-related activity. An employer simply has to know that a
potential employee is "famous online" before deciding whether or not to hire
her, along with the risks that that might entail.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _If as an employee you invent something that is related to your normal job
> activities, then it is deemed the property of your employer_

You have not fully digested the implications of the invention-rights
assignment that all large companies (and most small companies) will make you
sign.

Note that CA has interesting differences.

~~~
pcrh
Care to clarify? I'm in the UK, though have worked in the Bay Area for many
years.

~~~
jpdoctor
First IANAL. That said: In the US, invention-rights assignment assigns _all_
of your inventions to the companies, whether it relates to your normal job
activities or not.

CA labor law is (as usual) a little different: If the invention is on your own
time, with no resources whatsoever of the company, then the invention is yours
regardless of the assignment . Of course, proving that you did not use company
resources comes down to $$ in lawyers and court costs.

~~~
pcrh
That's how I saw it. The "no company resources" angle is why so many people
have their inspirational idea "while on vacation, and driving a friend's car"
;-)

------
etfb
The rest of the article is so-so, but the emphasis on avoiding offending one's
cow-orkers misses the key point: if employee A is annoyed that employee B is
getting more money for doing more and better work, it should be reasonably
obvious that employee B _isn't the problem_.

~~~
moconnor
I thought the problem was stated as employee A complains that employee B is
spending all his time writing personal blog posts instead of doing "his fair
share" of the work.

------
happypeter
I will encourage people to build their own online fame, then the daily work
they do, they are not only doing it for the company, but also for their
personal honor, thus they will be more willing to produce good work even maybe
that means some extra work.

I see a far better society where individuals are respected more.

------
michaelochurch
"Celebrity" is a clumsy metaphor for this because most _celebrities_ are made
by behind-the-scenes executives and agents who have a lot of power.
Celebrities are mostly made products. Establishing independent credibility is
something else. It's not outsized fame, but it's still enough of a force that
companies are beginning to see it as dangerous.

Thirty years ago, companies held all the cards, because credibility came from
job titles and references that only a hand-picked class of stewards called
"managers" could hand out, then managed to convince the peasants that it was
"unethical" to play out-of-band (by having a friend give a reference as
manager, or upgrading a title). If they wanted to reduce a target's career
credibility to zero, they could do so. They could fire that person and give a
terrible reference and call the person "disgruntled" if he said anything bad
about them. They could even reduce the employee's job title and fail to
acknowledge that he held the higher one at any time: their word against his.
The only recourse an employee had was to sue the employer, which is mutually
assured destruction at best, because even winning a termination suit is
usually bad for a person's career.

Companies could also bring ruin upon people who spoke the truth about them, so
almost no one did, and this kept their pristine organizational reputations
(and thus, their credibility) intact.

We're moving toward a different sort of economy in which these middlemen are
losing their hold. The one-sided expectation of "professionalism" (companies
can be abusive, but employees and exes are expected to keep their interests
and secrets no matter what) is ending. It's a very good thing, but it's scary
for corporations because they've lost control of information, and because it's
not hard to make recruiting just enough harder to cost the company more than,
say, a 6- to 12-month severance (which is extremely generous, at least in the
U.S.) would cost.

------
drivebyacct2
This just in after the wsj that likely used the co-branded celebrity HN
comment from earlier as the source for it's repeatedly vaguely mentioned
source.

