A marketing firm in Essex has sacked a teenage member of staff for branding her job “boring” on Facebook. (full story here).
It’s another good example of how people let their guard down online - only to find they must face the real life consequences later.
The marketing firm has won a lot of publicity for this but I doubt it’ll do them an awful lot of good. I do sympathise with the firm because it must feel like a slap in the face to be employing someone in the present difficult marketplace only for them to effectively slag the firm off in a public arena.
And, yes, Facebook is public. The girl in this story had made the mistake of giving her co-workers access to her Facebook page only for one of them to tip off the boss to her remarks. Proof that the term “friend” on Facebook means very little.
But by sacking the girl the boss comes over as rather mean spirited and humourless. A better approach would have been to give the youngster a warning and ask her to remove the remark from the page. She would have learnt a valuable lesson about web confidentiality without losing her job and the firm would not have been left with a somewhat bruised reputation.
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