Another day, another blogger gets herself fired (or, to use the more populor term, dooced) This is nothing new, and has been happenning since 2002, so I'm not going to go all into the usual bits about how you shouldn't blog about work, blog at work, think about blogs at work, mention your blog at work, explain to people what the word blog means ("Blog? What is that?"), etc etc etc. Instead, I thought I'd take a few minutes of non company time to attack the other side of the equation that hardly ever gets mentioned, why employeres shouldn't be doocing in the first place (and no, there will no mushy bits about First Amendment human dignity crap, because businesses only care about what affects the bottom line. So, you're humming along and you've just discovered that an employee is blogging. About work. At work. Time to fire their asses, right? Hold the phone, bucko, and time to sit back and think about this for a minute. Unless they're leaking top secret super secret trade secret stuff about your new iPod ([sarcasm]They'll be smaller and cheaper, stop the presses![/sarcasm]) product line, you may want to reconsider things. Top 5 Reasons Not To Dooce (fire someone because of their blog) 1) Firing The Employee Will Attract Attention. She's mentioning secret product information (on purpose or not), problems in the office culture, unflattering statements about the job, etc? Then why would you want to make her Internet Famous AND remove any incentive you have left for her to shut up? When somebody gets dooced, people talk about it. They read up on it. They write about it. They will make sure all the details get spread around. And the person you fire will probably be more then happy to vent all about it. If your concern is that your company laundry is being aired in public, then firing is only going to make sure that laundry appears on the front pages of blogs everywhere. Firing is not the solution. Having your company lawyer talk to employee, threaten them with firing, and coercing them to removing offending material is a better solution. People get fired for blogging, but very few will quit their job for blogging. 2) Dooce = Low Morale = Low Productivity People have problems with their jobs. Even happy employees have gripes. Or maybe they are too enthusiatic and accidentally spill the beans on the super secret thing (that, sadly, not many people really care about). Either way, when you dooce someone, yousend a very clear message to whomever is left behind, and it's not a positive message. If you dooce for work related blogging, then you're telling your employees that they're not employees, they're company property. If you fire someone for non-work related blogging, that's even worse, as you're telling your employees that the company is monitoring and juding their personal life. Either way, you've just made it harder to convince your employees that they should give a rat's ass about your company, other then being the faceless heartless thing that spits out paychecks. To put this into perspective, you probably spend at least $5000/year on group benefits for each full time employee. You don't do this to be nice, you do this is make them productive. Happy employees are productive employees, and workers that think they have a stake in the system work even harder, just ask Costco.When you dooce, you work against all that money you just spent, or to flip the coin, permitting blogging is probably one of the cheapest things you can do to help maintain high morale. No money spent, just a few hours to come up with a loose policy, and that's it. It's probably a marginal gain in productivity, but it's costing you next to nothing. Yahoo! does it, and I'm willing to bet your company wouldn't mind being the next Yahoo!. 3) Treating The Symptom, Ignore The Problem When you get a mosquito bite on your arm, do you put on a shirt and pretend it's not there, or do you put on some repellant? When you notice some rust on your water heater, do you lock the basement, or do you call the repairman? When you see lots of mysterious charges on your credit card, do you just not read the statements anymore, or do you call the fraud hotline? When an employee starts complaining about poor working conditions and problem managers and co-workers, do you fire the complainer or do you revaulate and retrain your employees? Let's put it another way. You spend a lot of money on employees, and even more money on a manager to oversee said employees. If the employees are unhappy, and are thus underperforming, then this highly paid manager is actually cost you money in lost productivity. Now, if employee complains in his blog, is it cost effective to fire him, spend more money on recruiting and training a replacement, and then placing the replacement in the exact same conditions that caused the first employee to complain? Or is it more cost effective to retrain the manager, NOT spend the money on recruting and training, AND wring more productivity out of the department? It's a tough call to make to judge if someone is just a troublemaker or if theire are legitimate complaints, but that's why YOU are being paid more then the manager. 4) Recruiting and Retention Costs Go Up When troutgirl got dooced, were you all eager to jump aboard the good ship Friendster? Do you really think that people are going to fall over themselves to apply for that now open position? I'm not saying that people are going to turn down an offer just for that, but it's going to figure into the equation, and that figure is going to be higher. Likewiese, when it comes to retaining an employee, it's one of those considerations that figure into the equation. Would the employee prefer a more relaxed working enviroment for the same (or even lower) pay, or are they going to stay and demand a higher compensation to do so? In both situations, you can look forward to your costs going up. Sure, it might be a marginal increase, but when you sit down and do the cost benefit analysis, the gains you get from firing someone are pretty nominal as well. And that marginal increase in cost isn't localized to the position vacated by the fired blogger, it's going to apply to every position you have to fill. For a few years. As American Airlines discovered, small savings spread over a large area adds up (1 less olive = $40,000/year). Just because a cost increase is marginal doesn't mean it's not a cost increase. 5) Free Advertising = Bad? To go back to Yahoo! for a second, they not only allow, but in cases even encourage their employees to blog about work. Ditto for Microsoft. Granted, both are trying to make a few bucks off the blogging marketplace, but they've grasped the bigger picture. Employees that blog (especially blog favorably) about work equals free advertising. If you set a formal blogging policy, I'd be willing to bet that by human nature people will mostly blog about the positive stuff at work. Because they know that co-workers will be reading their blogs, as will the boss, and thus will have a great disincentive to actually blog about anything bad. At the very least it helps lend credibility to your larger marketing efforts about being a company that cares about people. And don't you want employees to be so happy about their job and the products you produce that they are compelled to tell their family, friends, and strangers about how wonderful your piece-of-crap product is? Or would you rather spend millions of dollars on an advertising campaign? So there you have it, some simple reasons not to dooce. In every case, threatening the employee is the better solution, and if you can do it right they will be sympathetic towards the company position. :: And now, because this post isn't long enough yet, a special note. If you ARE going to dooce your employee, don't do it in The New York Times. Because it breaks all 5 rules above, and makes it plainly obvious to everybody on planet earth, that Helaine Olen is an asshole (and a bit of a slut too). Let's take a look at some choice points: I hadn't exactly been a stranger to the sexual shenanigans of our previous baby sitters. ... Yet those were problems I could feel superior to and that made me grateful for the steady routine of marriage and children. Translation: I am the boss-lady, I must be superior in every regard. Leona Helmsely is my idol. My husband thought her writing precociously talented but wanted to fire her nonetheless. "This is inappropriate," he said. "We don't need to know that Jennifer Ehle makes her hot." Translation: I only want my sexless grandmother watching my children. Being reminded that the hot babysitter is hot to trot frustrates me because I can't have her. I felt I was young and hip by proxy ... I was amused - and more than a bit envious. I could have told her that I understood her life more than she realized, that I had not always been the boring hausfrau she must see. I could say that I, too, once stayed out late, drank too much and slept with the wrong people. Translation: I hate my life, and wish I was her. Most parents don't like to think the person watching their children is there for a salary. We often build up a mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay. Translation: Although I claim to love my children, I won't shell out the cash to actually pay someone what they deserve to look after them, so I create this selfishly stupid delusion instead. It's cheaper then buying her medical insurance. How dare the bitch destroy my illusion? The woman who was loving if a bit strict toward the children became in our view short and impatient, slamming doors and bashing pans when my toddler wouldn't sleep ... Translation: I am a self-centered bitch, because this is the only part where I talk about her performance at her job of looking after my accessories children. I would log on upstairs to see if she was simultaneously posting entries below me on her laptop while the baby was napping. Too often she was. Translation: She's not an unblinking robot looking at my child every waking second she's in my employ? [editor's note: nanny is rather stupid for doing this, tho] A few days later her anger boiled over. "I am having the type of workweek that makes me think being an evil corporate lawyer would be O.K.," she wrote. "Seriously. Contemplated sterilizing myself yesterday." Whatever her reasons, whatever her frustrations, this was unacceptable. She had finally crossed my threshold of tolerance. Editor's Note: The Romans gave you Freedom of Thought. 1st Amendment gives you Freedom Of Speech. Helaine Olen gives you neither, apparently. My husband didn't bring up the blog with her and instead cited other factors for her dismissal. Translation: We're too chickenshit to tell her the truth ... to her face. In the NYT, however, is OK. Oh, and we also opened ourselves to possible litigation as the reasons stated for dismissal were total fabrications. We're liars. He did not, he told me, care to find himself a character online. Translation: She wouldn't rate my sexual hotness for an audience of dozens = fired. Sleeps with me on a regular basis = OK to include me in an unflattering story read by hundreds of thousands. Personally, I think nanny probably went too far. And you never tell the boss about your blog. I don't find much sympathy for her. But the good news is that Helaine Olen is hiring! So, if you're a sexless, mindless, emotional-less, spineless, supplicating drone that likes to be paid poorly (and probably under the table too, hope the IRS wasn't reading that article, Helaine), then this job's for YOU. (oh, and expect any part of your personal life to exposed on Helaine's blog, I mean NYT articles).