Social media has both positive and negative impact on the performance of any given organization. The use of social media in the health fraternity can help health practitioners save lives by sharing information with other physicians and discussing the best methods to handle the particular condition. The sharing of patient information on social media has a number of disadvantages that include violating the regulations of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the patient privacy (McBride, 72).
The HR has ventured to start an awareness program to take into effect the various advantages and disadvantages of social media at the workplace. The work of the HR is to provide education and guidelines on the uses of social media at the workplace so as to better the performance of the employees at the workplace and reduce the various conflicts that come with the social utility sites. The employees in the organization can take this program at their own stipulated time and it is meant to provide flexibility to the work schedule in the organization. The program is meant to spell out the various uses of social media in the workplace and both in the lifestyle of the employees. There are instances when employees tend to use social media during the business hours. This is a trait that comes due to lack of knowledge on how and what to do and not to do with social media. Therefore, in order to derive the best practices out of the employees, there is need to train them on how to use social media and its effects. Training the employees on the use of social media will therefore mean that the particular individual will know how to manage time. The time will be structured on meeting the goals of the organization and connecting with the use of social media. There is also a tendency that the particular individual will use social media constructively to develop his or her career at the workplace. There are cost implications to this venture. This are brought about by the need to recruit trainers that will create awareness in the company. The company cannot endorse internal management members to deal with the training of the employees. This is because the problem affects the entire company and therefore there is need to have an unfamiliar face in the company. The entire company has to be trained on the use of social media in a way to make it useful to the company. Since the trainers have to be outsourced, there is need to have their wages planned out in order to ensure that the training program goes according to plan. The logistics required to acquire models to use in demonstrations and lesson props may be tedious. The props maybe expensive, unavailable or need expertise to handle. This will make the training program stall either in its initial or continuity stage.
There are a number of problems that are bound to affect the awareness program. This comes from the resistance of the employees to be trained on the proper use of social media. There are employees that feel it is their right to have privacy in their lives apart from the job and therefore take the social media platform a private affair. This way, they might not attend the programs or rather they may not take into effect the lessons transmitted. Ignorance is another problem that the HR is bound to face. There are employees who do not use social media and they may tend to feel like they don’t fit. Therefore, they are bound to ignore the training and this will still affect them because of the diversity of social media around them. The program will be evaluated by the strategy of observation and survey. Observation will be based on the behavior of the employees and the return of their efforts to work related obligations. Employees work should be monitored through results and if it delivers, then it means that the employees are working and that the program has improved their social media behavior. Survey should be launched where employees are awarded a chance to use social media. This means that the use can be monitored where some aspects can be picked out by the way they use the media. There are employees that will use social media for entertainment, those that will exploit it to share information about work or even social exchanges. The time they spend on social media will also tell how much the awareness program is impacting them.
Bullying
There are cases of bullying in nearly every aspect of life. This is because of the interaction of individuals who tend occupy different social and economics classes. Therefore bullying can emanate from any angle as long as there are two or more people interacting in an environment. This is the reason that the management has to device means to evade such occurrences at the workplace or even school environments. It is important that the organization sets up policies or procedures that will help in curbing the bullying behavior in organizations. The HR in the organization should be on the forefront to protect individuals from being harassed in the organizational setting. Bullying has dangerous effects to the performance of an individual, it also lowers an individual’s tendency to trust the methods or even advice offered by the bully. The performance of the individual is affected in that it affects the person’s confidence to work. A bullied individual tends to consider him or herself a weak subject. This way, whatever he or she does cannot be done in a usual-self manner. The bullied individual will fear the bully and despise any advice or direction that the bully provides. This is because the trust that the bullied person has for the bully diminishes with every passing day of harassment. This is the reason that individuals who are bullied tend to withdraw and fall out of place in their work. They will hate the work place and all the associated attributes to work and therefore affect their performance. The method to curb bullying is to ensure that employees have the confidence in the HR, fellow employees and the senior management in the organization. This way, the mode of reporting and information sharing cannot be unidirectional and therefore cases of bullying can be reported to any of the departments or even the colleagues. It means that the culture at the office should encourage continuous communication in order to curb inferiority.
Employees tend to be bullied by the work they are assigned to or their seniors. This therefore means that the HR should devise means to ensure that the work the employees are tackling is up to standard of the employee. This can be done by assessing the particular standards of the work and the overall performance of the employee from the assigned work. The allocation of work should be done after careful analysis of the employee qualification and the magnitude of work. The set targets in the workplace can also bully an employee, whereby the individual will have to work for long hours or take heavy quotas of work in order to diligently work them out and bring out the results. This therefore means that an individual should be willing and choose to take a certain limit of work which is assessed as manageable by the HR and that the organization goals can be met with the particular pace. Allocation can also come due to an employee’s lack to fit into the company culture. The unfitting employee is bound to bully a fitting member for the satisfaction or to cover up the sense of not fitting. Such situations need the HR to ensure that employees recruited in the company meet the minimal standards that the culture has set, then they should be oriented and the culture requirements spelt out. This will help them interact consistently and fit into the company culture without the hitches to bully others.
There can be various meetings in the organization where the employees meet in groups and even with the organization stakeholders. These meetings should be the stepping stones to encourage boldness in that employees speak out their problems at the workplace. The problems that they face can also be communicated through anonymous letters to the HR in order to address the various problems they face. This way, the employees will be able to communicate their problems that need to be highlighted. To evaluate the results and the methods effectiveness to find out the presence of bullying and its effects, HR should be on the lookout. There should be a team of employees and one or two members from the HR to assess the reports that the employees present on the various problems. There are instances when the bullies will be mentioned in the anonymous letters. The workload or scope can be the problem and through the encouragement of boldness, employees are bound to mention them. Communicating to the employees and highlighting the effects also encourages the employees to speak out on the issues. The evaluation team should organize a retreat away from the organization premises where the employees can meet on their own or with some varied number of managers in order to highlight the problems facing them in the organization. This way, the truth about management behavior and the employees will be highlighted. The HR should be on the lookout on the behavior patterns and the responses so as to derive the prevalent effects. The varied responses are bound to bring out a certain pattern which when studied or analyzed will bring out the prevalence of any bullying behavior. There is a tendency that correcting some of the problems will help the employees to be happy at the workplace. This means that the various behavior of employees are bound to change and the HR should be able to pick out this important behavior changes.
Works Cited
Granstra, C. "Nurse Against Nurse: Horizontal Bullying in the Nursing Profession." Journal of Health Care Management (2015): 249-256. Print.
McBride, M. "Social Media Hold Great Promise, Danger: Complying with HIPAAA requires a Staff Strategy and Properly Defined Patient Information." Medical Economics (2012): 70-74. Web.
