73. Should you add your colleagues to social media? with Prina Shah

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace. This one is going to be a really good one to help you. Hello and welcome to this solo episode of the Ways to Change Your Workplace podcast with me, your host, Brina Shah. And today I want to talk to you about the question that thousands of people over my career have asked me. The question is, the big question is, should you add your co-workers to social media? Now, when I'm talking about social media, I want to add a bit of a caveat here. I'm not talking about LinkedIn. Go wild, add your colleagues on LinkedIn. It is a professional social media network. That's what it's for. But here, what I really want to focus on are social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and all of the other new things that keep on popping up, which are beyond me. So the question is: should you add your coworkers to social media? And remember, we're not talking about LinkedIn here. I'm gonna approach this from a pros and cons perspective. I love to begin with the pros. In terms of pros of adding your co-workers to social media, the fact is that you get to know each other, you all get to understand their lives, you all get to understand their personal milestones, and therefore understand at a deeper level what that human is all about. You'll connect, definitely so. There's a thing, a psychological term called perceived proximity, and perceived proximity means that the more we see or hear from someone, the more we feel like we know them. This podcast, for example, hello to my regular listeners. I hear from lots of you, and I feel that by the way that you respond to me via you know my LinkedIn or via my Instagram, that you definitely do know me. But yes, you know me at a certain level, absolutely so, with the stuff that I put out on social media, and that is perceived proximity in that you have a connection with me, and that's the whole intention of creating such a podcast, absolutely, to connect with my audience, you, and to share wonderful, thought-provoking podcasts with you. So I hope you feel that you've got to know me far more. If you don't, then you need to check out episode 50, and that shows you why I do what I do, and I get really deep and personal in that one. So, ghost talk, check it out. So, in terms of should you connect with your co-workers on social media, perceived proximity is a real psychological effect that happens when we do connect with others on social media. It's really fascinating. You feel like you are far more connected. The other pro of connecting with your colleagues on social media, if you work for a global organization, a humongous organization where people are based all over the world, you don't have the ability to have water cooler conversations in person. And these conversations are so so useful from a perspective of connecting with each other, to get to know with each other, to share our frustrations, and to go beyond the facade often that we put at work to truly get to know each other at a deeper level. So global organizations definitely benefit from enabling each other from a workplace perspective to connect with each other's on social media. The other really interesting thing about perceived proximity is that you and I are like friends or we feel like we are friends. Our little monkey brains are so wired to connect and to attach to people that it feels like we know each other. So, from a workplace perspective, when we have perceived proximity, it is actually a positive thing. Because when you know, like and trust someone through social media, it feels like when we go back to work, you don't want to let that person down. So it could result in team cohesion. Some people have told me that being out there on social media with their friends or you know, with their work colleagues, has in fact opened career opportunities for them. And career opportunities in the sense of promotions or um media promotions or whatever else, in terms of when people share their expertise from a workplace perspective. And I've had you know, I share all of my stuff on my personal Facebook feed, and still people say to me, Oh my gosh, I didn't know you worked on that. So it's it's expanding your echo chamber and your network, so to speak. Now, when you want to connect with someone on social media at work, if it's a thing that you're really into, it's really important to have a caveat, and that caveat when you approach someone to connect with you on social media is to ideally say it's wonderful if you want to connect, but if you don't want to connect, I respect your privacy, and that's all good. We can't force people to connect with each other. I've got a personal story that I'll share with you in the cons section. I've got lots of stories for you in the cons section. So why not? Let's just move on to the cons of adding your co-workers to social media. Now, many a con. We discover divides on social media, that's divisive, and it changes your opinion of your colleague potentially. We all know that you know topics of politics, sex, and religion are often taboo because they're so personal to all of us. Now, if someone votes against the party that you vote for, for example, you might take offense to that. If someone is against homophobia, you might take offense to that, for example. These are just ideas that I'm throwing out to you right now. There's a power differentiation as well, if you're a boss, and that's what I want to talk to. So when you're a boss and you have to then potentially have performance conversations or more curly conversations with your uh team, it's difficult. You're attempting to do a TikTok dance, let's say, and you know, your team member has liked it, and then you walk in that morning and you have to have a difficult conversation with them. It really muddies the water for people in positional roles. You know, you've got positional power, so use it wisely. My example here is when I worked in the corporate world, lots of my team and lots of the people, you know, my customers when I was in corporate asked me to connect on Facebook, on LinkedIn, all of that. I said no to every single person. For me, I am a private person, my private life is private. And I said to my team, especially the the ones who are closest to me, guys. Well, I'm not gonna connect you with you on socials because of the fact that I might have to have a difficult conversation with you, or you might have to have a difficult conversation with me. So I'd like to keep this professional. Let's connect on LinkedIn. Absolutely so, but hey, when I quit this job, we are absolutely able to connect on social media, we can go wild then. So that's how I managed it, and you know, working in HR, it is really difficult in that you work with the whole organization and you have a lot of influence and a lot of intel as well. You get to find out what's happening in people's lives, so there's a fine line between being friends and being friendly, is what I also say. So I was always very cautious about connecting with people on social media when I was in a job. After a job, after I've quit, yeah, absolutely. So let's be friends on social. Another con that I have seen when co-workers are friends on social media is when things get really sticky. So, here we go. I have had to sack somebody, I've had to terminate their employment. Horrible words, and it was a horrible situation. Now, this person was on social media, they had their organization name linked to their social media profile, and it was a beautiful charity that we worked for, which was inclusive of all types of people from society. This person had personal opinions, he was racist and he was homophobic vocally on many, many, many forums on social media. And what ended up happening is that someone, a random from social media, actually complained to our organization, and I had to take it on as an investigation, and then I went down a whole rabbit hole of this person's social media profiles, and they were all public. I took screenshots of every single thing, and oh my gosh, they were sackable offenses. So that's an example to share with you. If you do have you know out there opinions or opinions which aren't very mainstream, then lock your systems down, have your social media private channels, be very cautious. Another example I have is of a manager who was best friends with her team member. They worked in a little town and you know, small country town, uh, they shared school rides, school pickups in the morning and afternoon, so they're best of friends. It came to the situation where this team member's performance was questioned, and the manager had to have performance conversations with her. What ended up happening from proactive conversations about the performance to support this individual, it turned nasty. Now, it didn't turn nasty at work, it turned nasty on social media. This person thought that they could behave wonderfully at work, but on social media, this person sent lots of abusive messages, texts, threats you name it, to their manager who was also their best friend. Not a good thing. I had to get involved, and again, I had to investigate all of those social media channels. The thing is, if you push it out there in the public, it's public. Let's remember that. So we have to be really mindful of our digital footprint, and that's what I'm really mindful of. Me, for example, I'm really mindful to put positive stuff out there, stuff that'll help you. Um, ideally, not any garbage. There's lots of crap out there on social media. I don't want to add to it. It's also challenging to be one person. I don't know about you, but we wear many, many hats. It's difficult enough just to be Prina as Prina. So why be two people? We often have different personas on social media versus real life, so it's really essential to be careful and curate what you've got out there online. And remember, social media is a performance, it is a performative act, really. I use social media for my business, I don't use it whatsoever for my personal life. We often talk about bringing your full self to work, so this is a really interesting concept as well. When we bring our full selves to work, me for example, I used to be my best self when I was at work. You don't need to know my personal stuff about what's happening in my personal life or my quirks about my OCD about having things in a certain order or whatever. You don't need to know about that. The best self that I bring to my work is in relation to my work self. So I really want to highlight the fact that we have many selves. There's Prina at home, Prina at work, Prina's a daughter, Prina's a partner, Prina's a sister, you know, all of that. So you really need to consider how you curate your professional brand. Now, if you haven't listened to the episode on how to manage your professional brand with the wonderful Lana Hill, you need to tune into that. It's an excellent episode that I think complements this episode. So if you are gonna go out there on social media, then tune into that episode because it's really important to curate your profile on social media. You can't be out there all the time. So we need a sanctuary to feel safe and to feel like us. So sometimes, from a cons perspective of inviting your co-workers to social media, it's not really a sanctuary. Everyone knows everything about you. That might not be a good thing. So there's alternatives. Why not connect with your colleagues over lunch, over coffees, over drinks, over meaningful stuff at work? And that's exactly what I used to do when I was in corporate. And remember, Instagram didn't exist until recently, so this is quite the new phenomenon. But I've had so many people ask me whether they should add their colleagues to social media. People are opting out of social media as well, more and more so as we see. Gen Z, especially, I'm not generally fans of social media from what I've seen. So it's really interesting to consider how you want to approach social media. How do you want to curate yourself on social media if you are going to invite your colleagues to connect with you? So for myself as a CEO, as a brown Indian woman, I'm very conscious of my internet footprint. I'm really conscious to be a positive role model for the people that listen to me and read my stuff and whatever, because I want to put good shit out there, not crap shit. So I ask you to consider before you add your colleague to social media, how do you want to be perceived? Consider that. Before you send them the connection link, think twice about whether you want to be friends or whether you want to be friendly. What I used to do at my workplace is be friendly with every single person, absolutely so. But we're not going to be mates, no way. That's just not the reality. No way are you going to be friends with every single person that you work with? So I ask you to consider whether you are going to add your co-workers to social media. If you've got any thoughts, if you've got any questions, if you've got any comments, connect with me on LinkedIn and let's deepen this conversation. See you there. And I'll see you in the next episode. If you stand against crappy culture, lousy leaders and topic teams.