Not trusting your employees leads to fumbles and stumbles
There was a story a few weeks back that got some minor play in the press and the blogosphere around a Hamilton police officer who had the good sense to leverage YouTube as a means of identifying two suspects. With the traffic that sites such as YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and other social media sites garner - and the relative ease and speed with which such info can be disseminated, it’s almost a no-brainer for posting appeals for witnesses, info on missing children and general ‘wanted’ notices to be posted there.
And whilst the majority of mainstream media focused on this apparent first use of YouTube in this manner, what caught my eye was this little section of Ian Austin’s story in the NYTimes :
“After a week, YouTube had not brought the police in Hamilton any closer to finding the men, although Sgt. Lasso said the experiment was still worthwhile. He acknowledges making one mistake. Because the police department’s main computer system does not allow access to YouTube, Sgt. Lasso made the connection through a non-network computer, using a YouTube account belonging to officers who search for online child pornography. As a result, the YouTube posting inadvertently revealed one of the squad’s online screen names, jayjay551. Sgt. Lasso assumes that pseudonym will now be retired.”
It’s a common enough practice for corporate IT departments to apply blocks to social networking or hosted blog sites. The common wisdom being “we can’t have precious moments of productivity wasted because everyone’s looking at the wedding photos passed along from Fred in marketing, putzing about on YouTube watching the monologue from last night’s Daily Show, or reading the latest on their neighbour’s journal“.
Of course, this is a poor move - throwing out the wheat with the chaff. Ted in accounting will spend three minutes doodling or twiddling his thumbs, as opposed to watching todays RocketBoom, and Sally in PR will totally miss critical remarks aimed at your brand on an influential blog.
When IT blocks users from making what, to them, seems normal behaviour, an end-run is usually done to IT. This creates an overall breakdown in communication within the company and leads to potential compromises to security or inadvertent leaks of sensitive data.
Worse than missed opportunities, however, is the underlying message to such blanket moves. “We don’t trust you“.
I don’t know how an organization can be expected to continue with effective or meaningful communication when and where there is a fundamental under-pining of mistrust. We’ve seen this happen in corporations, where a well meaning supervisor hoping to eke out a percentage of inefficiency ends up causing far worse productivity due to breakdowns in communication and lowered morale. Now, it would seem the practice is carrying over to the public sector, where, it not only sends a poor message to the employees but to the public at large. Trust your public servants, we are told, yet they are not trusted by their own supervisors.
Somewhere along the way, someone in IT or administration decided that the police officers in Hamilton could not be trusted to avoid wasting their time, and put arbitrary blocks on various social networking sites. The initial fallout is that an undercover net-name has been compromised. Hopefully there is a reexamination of this policy and the officers of Hamilton are granted the trust they deserve.
