However, social media usage in the Middle East is becoming an essential part of life. According to a study by Performics MENA, 85 percent of interested users polled have at least one social media account, and 61 percent have two or more. The number of mobile phones per capita is an indicator of the growth of mobile social media in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and this growth will rapidly bring the issues of privacy to the forefront: Saudi Arabia — 1.7 phones per capita; UAE — 1.4 phones; Iran — 1.3 phones; Egypt — 1.1 phones. As organizations increase their presence through corporate Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn sites, the overlap between personal and corporate social media outlets will increase.
In the area of privacy, a new concern is the rise of “bring your own device” (BYOD) for corporate mobile solutions. Just five years ago, organizations provided the mobile solution for their workforces, in the form of either a BlackBerry or another standardized device. This allowed the organization to control usage by owning the device and thus having full content and access control via policy. A combination of price and lack of platform adoption by social media made the privacy concerns a nonissue. Flash forward to today, when smartphones account for greater than 60 percent of the mobile market in nine countries, including the UAE, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, where the penetration exceeds 70 percent. Organizations now face the decision of how to approach BYOD. They might reduce capital expenditures and possibly improve employee engagement, because employees will be using a device of their choosing. However, IT issues will increase, because configuration will be needed for multiple device platforms, and, even more challenging, privacy issues of content on the device will increase.
If employees use their own devices and connect to an organization’s network infrastructure, it is not clear to what extent media or files stored on a device can be subject to scans and/or policies, particularly with clearly segregated data. For example, can photos taken on a personal device be subject to a scan? What about browsing history? Should employees be allowed to use their own mobile data packages and access their social media from work, even during meal or other break times?
Organizations need to determine their positions on social media for employees. In 2012, the first GCC Government Social Media Summit debated whether social media are simply a fad. In 2013, the debates centered around the best ways for governments to use social media as a tool to engage with their respective populations. This stance puts more direct interaction between organizations and individuals and further blurs the line of appropriate usage of social media in the workplace. Governments may distribute key information to citizens and residents via social media channels, adding information to the respective profiles of each employee, based on his or her status within the country.
As an employer, in 2004, I was preparing to launch an employee satisfaction survey for the entire division of a large global bank. In the last days before the survey launched, we had to delay its distribution to associates in the U.K. because our vendor was not in compliance with data-privacy regulations; there was a direct link to the survey access through employees’ IDs.
Ignoring social media as a possible data point for company decisions is a futile effort. For example, here in the GCC, my organization had an employee who had returned from annual leave. Nearly two months later, my wife mentioned during dinner that she read something on one of the expat discussion boards — just the normal venting of frustrations from people living abroad. Then my wife said, “Does this sound like your company?” She read the generic description from one post. It certainly fit the profile. There was a link to the person’s blog at the end of the mini-rant, so I followed it. It was a personal blog of a traveling spouse keeping When desktop or laptop computers were the primary methods of integrating social media, it was simple to block access to sites or restrict use on corporate hardware. As smartphones, BlackBerrys and tablets have now become essential components, the global workplace faces the challenge of balancing privacy concerns with organizational needs. 22 CERTIFIED 2014: Volume I www.HRCI.org family and friends connected from across the globe. Then I read that the family had not returned from the annual leave; only the employee had returned.
This became an employer issue because of the dependents’ benefits, such as education allowance, annual air tickets and so on, that the company would continue to pay until the employee informed us that his “social status” had changed. (The company did not require “proof” of return from leave.) As I wrestled with the question of privacy and how to justify questions to the employee that the organization had never asked of anyone returning from leave, something happened that gave me a reason to ask the questions. The employee had to renew his housing and was moving from a five-bedroom villa to a one-bedroom apartment. As soon as I saw the contract, I immediately had reason to ask, “How will your family of five live in a one-bedroom apartment?”
The dependents’ benefits totaled more than 20 percent of the employee’s annual remuneration. Without social media, the cost-related discovery might never have been made. The postmortem of this situation led the company to initiate more specific policies and controls, which help to mitigate the risk. The company did not, however, eliminate the social media component but only delayed the immediate need to address the issue of the organization’s use of social media to track or monitor employees.