Though social media increases the level of employee engagement in the organisation, there are

various legal, personnel & financial implications attached to it. For instance, post implementation
many organizations fail to create internal mechanisms to regulate usage of social media or make
employees aware of the do’s and don’ts in this regard. It has been observed on several occasions
that some employees leak organization’s privileged information on social media, whether
inadvertently or otherwise. Employees also tend to post their dissatisfaction with regard to their
workplace, supervisors or their environment on public forums creating a negative image for the
organization. Some employees even discuss critical trade information (viz. cost calculations, mark-up
margins, order quantity etc.) with their potential customers over social media thereby risking
information leakage to their competitors. Furthermore, apart from the above, it has also been
observed that increased usage of social media exposes the organization to sensitive issues like
discussion on politics, sexual orientation, religion etc. creating a mind-divide amongst team
members. These can have adverse impacts on overall employee productivity and morale.

Few potential issues lies with HR i

Problems Other side of the problems arise

Social media is altering the way individuals connect and share information. LinkedIn, Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter and other social media are converting the way we interact, and many companies
are trying to respond. Even companies attempting to avoid social media but they must be aware that
many of their employees and clients are using it, which can directly influence the company. Social
media suggests many potential benefits but none of which are guaranteed. Thoughtful managers
should carefully take into consideration the benefits and risks of social media, just as they do when
developing other new policies or evaluating a new vendor. Currently, no definitive standard of best
practices exists. In order to minimize risk, leaders must remember that the same compliance, legal
and ethical principles that apply to other employment practices also apply to social media.

It may be that social media can be a boon as well as a bane. If planned strategically, organizations
can use social media to leverage employee engagement by enabling employees to network with
other employees and create a collaborative work environment (Nov et al., 2010). This will help
organizations to reap benefits by fostering strong interpersonal workplace relationships and
improved team performance. It can be helpful to connect employees working in virtual teams, to
spread across different geographic locations or across different cross-functional domains, to share
resources and collaborate with each other on different work projects. Social media can be also used
to design interactive training platforms which can improve employees’ team-working and social skills
(Minocha, 2009). Social media can also promote knowledge sharing and knowledge creation through
user content generation, peer to peer communication, networking, multimedia orientation, and
user-friendly interfaces (Hakami et al., 2014). There can be numerous ways to create information
(through YouTube, employee resource groups, etc.), debated and influenced (through blogs),
disseminated (by social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter), as well as preserved as social
capital (through Wikipedia) (Sigala & Chalkiti, 2015). Social media also enables employees to shift
knowledge sharing from centralized to decentralized processes (Kane & Fichman, 2009) or from an
intermittent to a continuous workflow (Ellison & Boyd, 2013). Organizations can also create virtual
communities Social Media use in HRM 197 of interests, which empower employees in information
sharing and knowledge transfer, thereby amplifying productivity levels (Zhang, 2012). Furthermore,
social media helps employees to build strong networking based workplace relationships, thus
expanding their social capital. Through these networks, employees can build new contacts as well as
reconnect with their previous colleagues, thus gaining access to a larger professional community.
Social media can also be used by organizations to signal its internal organizational culture and
workplace climate to its external stakeholders. Organizations can inform prospective employees
about their corporate social responsibility initiatives, or inclusive workplace policies through
company web sites or its official pages on SNWs like Facebook and LinkedIn. Thus, social media
serves as an important platform to reduce information asymmetry between organizations and its
multiple stakeholders. This movement can be specifically driven by company top management
teams or the CEO. Leaders can make use of online forums to address stakeholder grievances and
resolve their queries and get valuable feedback from them. This helps develop effective
communication channels between employers and employees. As a form of workplace deviance,
prevalent use of SNWs by employees also has several negative implications in the workplace. For
example, employees can bad-mouth their employees on these platforms or disclose organizational
proprietary information (Skeels & Grudin, 2009) leading to corporate reputation damage, expensive
lawsuits, loss of competitive advantage, and market credibility (Flynn, 2012). Another major concern
for employers is to prevent its employees from engaging in cyberloafing activities in the workplace
which are counterproductive workplace behaviors (like online chatting, gaming, dating, and random
Internet browsing) that reduce employee productivity and engagement. Thus it becomes essential
for organizations to better understand employee intentions to cyberloaf and to take proactive
actions to mitigate such forms of deviant behavior.

social media is an important asset to organizations, which if handled strategically, can benefit them
by simplifying and augmenting several critical human resource management functions and processes
encompassing personnel selection, employee engagement, teambuilding, employee productivity,
and organizational image. At the same time, social media also serves as a potential liability for
organizations, which likewise needs to be managed effectively. As such, we believe that social media
is in the early stages of what is likely to be a continually changing dynamic for nearly every aspect of
human resource management. Despite the dynamic and impactful impact of social media on 198
DONALD H. KLUEMPER ET AL. the organizational environment, more academic study is needed in
virtually every area of this nexus between social media and HRM

References:

1. Isaacson K., Peacey S. (2012). Human Resources and Social Media, KPMG: 2, 9-10
2. http://www.slideshare.net/Croaghie/hr-social-seminar-advantage-231111-final
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304825950_Social_media_use_in_HRM
4. http://www.slideshare.net/albertsimard/human-resources-and-social-networks-the-future-
has-arrived12
5. file:///C:/Users/vslopac4/Downloads/SocialMediauseinHRM.pdf