Blogging at work ?

While you are on holidays how would you like to keep up to date with your work gossip? Many companies today are setting up blogs that allow employee’s to explore criticism.  Here is a link to one: http://positivesharing.com/

In regard, to blogosphere it can be a vehicle for global interactions and the formation of a work community (Richards, J., and Kosmala, K., 2013 p66) This gives employees, the ability to express how they feel about how the company is treating them and what needs to be improved. This format allows for ideas, feelings and honesty to be expressed without the pressure of a one on one conversation because of the Internet’s ability to create anonymity. This could improve the company as management can access and comment on this information and act to put improve these issues. In contrast, this format could become a place in which employees may take things too far and just use the forum for a work place ‘whinge and whine (Richards, J., and Kosmala, K., 2013 p69). Employers could also use the forum to express how they feel about misbehaviour and certain attitudes in the work place.  Having this on a blog allows it to be easily accessible to all employees. Thus, they can write on there at any time and from any place, so even on holidays you could still express your ideologies about the situation without even being in the country.  However, this medium is flexible enough to capture the attention of all people from various walks of life (Lim, M., 2012 p182) Which, does mean that potential customers could also come across the blog.  This could create a negative view on the company and reduce the amount of customers due to ‘the ideology interpretation appears problematic in terms of representing an overly negative, dystopian and deterministic account of cynicism, as well as being based on limited and narrowly focused empirical evidence’ (Richards, J., and Kosmala, K., 2013 p68) 

I feel as though this could be a good forum for work places to communicate and get ideas, however blogs are a very public forum, any one can see it. As such maybe workplaces need to look at creating a more private way to communicate. This could be through email or a facebook group/ inbox. These social media devices have the ability to work the same as the blog but it can control and limit its audience access.  

(Image: http://boomerhighway.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/people_office.jpg)

Reference List 

Richards, J., and Kosmala, K., 2013 ‘In the end, you can only slag people off for so long’: employee cynicism through work blogging’, New Technology, Work and Employment, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 68 – 77.

Lim, M., 2012 ‘Life is Local in the Imagined Global Community: Islam and Politics in the Indonesian Blogosphere’, Journal of Media and Religion, vol. 11, pp 127-140.