You’re always on duty

Last week, media in India was agog with the manhandling of a passenger on Indigo airlines, a budget carrier in India. For my non Indian readers the quick summary is that a passenger got into an argument with the airline stuff which quickly escalated into a physical altercation and two airlines employees then held the passenger to the ground with the images of one of them, holding him by his neck being the one that went around all the channels.

The airline moved pretty swiftly by taking disciplinary action against the employees. A pretty simple decision, as the staff were on duty and there is a clear manual on how to behave in these situations. A manual that they disregarded.

A few weeks ago Juli Briskman went on a bike ride. As she was out the President’s motorcade passed her by, and for whatever reason, she flipped the bird. Another iconic picture that went around the world. Here it is, once more.

Seeing the picture, Juli spoke to her employers to state that the picture was hers (though the name does not show up anywhere) and shared the picture on her own social media channels. Shortly after, she was fired, for violating the company’s social media policies.

And another episode closer home, a friend’s colleague got into a twitter argument with someone. At some point in time the person she was arguing with, did an on-line search for the employer name and sent a complaint email to the company’s global HQ with screen grabs of the offending chat. As expected, when something like this happens in a global company, an investigation was launched and the employee was called in and strongly advised to rethink his on-line behaviour as it was not aligned with the company’s values. Interestingly, the only place this person’s employer was named was on his Linkedin profile. Not the twitter one.

What this seems to suggest is that the line between personal and professional is blurring. We saw this start with the advent of mobile devices. Email and work calls did not recognise office from personal time. It was all one amorphous mass.

The same seems to be happening with the concept of being ‘on duty’. It appears that one is, slowly, always going to be on duty. The values of the company one works for are going to be expected to be followed in personal time as well. Usually all is fine, but when things go wrong then social media amplifies it tremendously and then the juiciness comes from taking on Goliath. Not the offending individual.

If you get into an argument with someone in a public space, you need to be well aware that when things go South your company’s name is going to feature prominently in any sound bytes about the episode.

Celebrities usually have a morality clause in their contracts, where they can be fired for doing something that affects their personal brand value and thereby impacting the value of the contract.

I imagine most employee contracts have something similar buried in the pages and pages of stuff we sign when we join a new company.

We all carry that implicit expectation from our employers that we don’t act in a way that shows them up poorly, even in a personal capacity.

Not applicable to the Indigo story of course, as they were at work, in uniform.

But when we are out of the work space, or how we interact with people on-line is where we are susceptible to our own morality clauses and where companies will increasingly expect their employees to be brand-true.