Social Media Shenanigans:To Use or Not to Use

Before the pandemic started, I had already started down the path of remote working. A couple of days a week not sitting in the Johannesburg traffic or dashing around to catch the Gautrain made me a much more productive employee and the quality of my family life changed drastically. It did mean working even more on that dreaded work-life balance.

Since the pandemic, we have all had those moments when personal and work lives are drastically blurred. A lot of personal activities are handled on our work devices purely for the convenience without any thought to the possible consequences. While none of it may seem particularly risky, you should avoid using your work issued devices for any personal or social media activities. This is not only for your own protection, but for the safety of your organization as well.

In between juggling kids and school, cooking, tidying up, running errands and a dozen Teams meetings per day, it’s hard not to just grab your work issued device to finish off that offer to purchase a new house or that vehicle finance document that needs to be sent off. The ability to multi-task and sit in on a meeting while we pay the electricity bill or for the groceries in our shopping carts is tempting and cuts a few hours of our already hectic day, but we need to be reminded that our employers can and probably do monitor everything we do on any official work issued device, be it a laptop, smartphone or tablet.

Some things to consider regarding personal activities on work devices:

You cannot expect to be afforded any form of privacy. Yes-it sounds unfair and almost illegal but organizations have every right to monitor what you are up to on work issued devices. It doesn’t matter if your activities are outside of work hours. It doesn’t matter if it was urgent. It doesn’t matter if it only took a few minutes. If it’s not your personal device, you have no privacy.

Employers are very wary with giving employees unlimited access to social media sites. Most large corporates or big organizations have established policies that prevent any access at all to any social media platforms. If you belong to a company that affords you this privilege, do be responsible. One of the key reasons is that employees can easily download a virus or malware from their escapades on the net. If you have itchy fingers that click on any link or attachment you see, you pose a very real threat to your employer.

Never connect a USB or external hard drive to a work issued device. Even if your intentions are not malicious, your USB or external hard drive could contain a virus. You might be innocently wanting to transfer some music to get you through your heavy work load or to drown out the sound of other meetings going on in your home at the same time and the repercussions could be a costly data breach for your company and you losing your job.

Do not install software that is not approved by the company. You may hear of software that makes your work life easier but if it’s not issued by your company’s IT department, when you attempt to install it, it will probably be blocked or raise an alert to the powers that be. If you need software for work related activities, rather speak to your IT department and get permission for it.

Don’t complete your online shopping on work devices. A little bit of browsing may be overlooked but rest assured that your activity is tracked and you do not want to enter a performance discussion where your manager has data to refute your claims that you work tirelessly without even taking a lunch break! E-commerce sites are usually red flags in most companies so save yourself the hassle and don’t shop online on a work issued device.

Porn should be an obvious one but a surprising amount of people still browse porn on work issued devices. You wont get away with it even if you are opening the website in the Incognito mode of your browser, even if its at an ungodly hour of the night and seriously, even if you are in another country, you will be caught. End of story!

Looking for new employment using a work issued device is just in poor taste. Very poor taste. Don’t then wonder why you didn’t land that promotion you were certain was yours.

Do not save anything personal on your company device or their cloud network. Bank statements, medical records, holiday photo’s, kids school reports are just a few common files that often get saved to work issued devices. Even if you delete the document, unless that device is completely destroyed, those documents will always be retrievable.

My final thoughts on this would be:

· Do read your company social media and security policies

· Do use your common sense

· Do value your privacy and use your own device for all personal and social media activities