The battle to separate the personal and the professional
Social media is inexorably coalescing our personal and professional identities. What happens when baby pictures, political views, drinking habits, and hobbies collide with your corporate persona?
The idea that your personal life is relevant to your success at work is not new. In fact, the idea that your personal life is not relevant to your work is new. Old-fashioned networking through social ties (such as college fraternities and country clubs) results in a strong correlation between traditional social networks and business networks. Go back further in history, and you find careers passed down from generation to generation.
Even though it’s illegal in the United States to discriminate in hiring based on race, sex, marital status and a host of other factors, there’s ample evidence that executive career success (PDF) is correlated to certain demographic characteristics. (The implications for those of us who are not part of the preferred demographic cohort—white married men—are troubling.)
In many organizations, especially large corporations, the military, and parts of the government/civil service, spousal career support is expected. For example, the military has family support groups to help families manage the stress of extended deployments. For a given unit, the commander’s spouse is expected to lead or at least contribute to the family support group. An unmarried unit commander, or a commander married to someone who refuses to take on this responsibility, is at a career disadvantage compared to his peers with more cooperative wives.*
For many of us who work in technology, the idea of being judged by our spouse’s or significant other’s behavior seems, at best, antiquated.
Facebook is basically your father’s old boy network. In the past, a drunken escapade at the Christmas party might become the stuff of legend via the office rumor mill (which may be analog, but is nonetheless terribly efficient). The same drunken escapade captured on Facebook becomes problematic not just within the existing office network but potentially with a wider audience. The root of the problem, however, remains the same—the inconvenient commingling of personal and business life.
I still snicker about how some of my more, shall we say, party-loving college friends have turned into apparently responsible adults. I don’t think I’d care to attend college in today’s era, where a night of partying can easily be documented on Facebook for posterity and potential hiring managers.
On a more optimistic note, there are major benefits to online networks, especially the ability to maintain relationships with friends, family, and colleagues that I rarely see in person.
I believe that strict separation of business and professional life is impossible. The behavior of your friends and family will have an impact on your professional life. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that “firing a worker’s fiancé in retaliation for a sex discrimination claim filed by the worker is itself unlawful (full article, NY Times).
What is the best way to handle your dual identities as a professional and as an individual? Acknowledge and manage the conflict. Acknowledge that someone will probably be offended by your political and religious views, no matter what they are. Think about whether you care. Do your coworkers, colleagues, and professional peers largely agree with your views or are you an outlier? What parts of your personal life are you willing to share with your business life? Beyond that, may I recommend the following:
- Don’t be an idiot.
- Don’t do stupid stuff
- If you do something stupid, don’t put it on Facebook.
- Recognize that your political and religious views (or lack thereof) will be offensive to someone. Think twice before you post a call to participate in events that are obviously political or religious.
- People will judge you by your friends and your affiliations. Think twice before you “Like” that Glenn Beck post. (I tried to come up with a liberal equivalent, but couldn’t think of anyone equally offensive. I’m sure my bias is showing.)
What are your strategies for managing the intersection of personal and professional life?
* Technically, the expectations are gender neutral. There are, of course, military officers who are women. However, it was my experience when I was an Army wife that somehow, it was understood that the few Army husbands might not be available due to their own professional commitments. Army wives were expected to put the Army first and any cute little side job second. PS I’m not THAT old. This was in the late 1990s.
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Mary (@choyberg)
Hi Sarah- Nice post. I love “I’m sure my bias is showing” 😉 My friend Val just blogged about a similar topic (http://www.contentrules.com/blog/corporate-or-personal-blog/). Do you keep a personal blog, on a different site than Scriptorium?
Sarah O'Keefe
Hi Mary,
Interesting post from Val.
I technically have a personal blog, but I hardly ever update it. My thought was that the personal blog would get recipes and political content, but in reality, it just doesn’t happen. Also, I think it’s worth noting that even if I put information on a personal blog, customers or potential customers might still take that information into account in deciding whether or not to hire us. I’m not totally sure that the separation helps me as a business owner. Unless, of course, I make the personal blog impossible to find. But then, nobody would read it. Tough choice!
Larry Kunz
In an age where a prospective employer is more apt to look at my social media presence than my resume, this is a major concern. So far I haven’t gone onto Facebook at all, because I’m not comfortable having people judge me as a professional based on my political and religious views. And it really doesn’t matter whether people would tend to agree or consider me an “outlier.” (I’d say that there’s probably a little bit of both.)
To a large degree I feel constrained because I don’t want to offend someone and thus bring reproach — or even lost revenue — to my employer. Sarah, I’d be curious to know whether you, as a business owner, feel more or less constrained than if you were a captive employee or if you were self-employed. (My guess is that it’s pretty much the same for all of us.) Also, what would you do if one of your employees started posting political rants on their personal blog or became a YouTube sensation for all the wrong reasons?
Sarah O'Keefe
@Larry: People will judge you. It’s what humans do. Facebook just makes it really, really easy to judge you from afar instead of, let’s say, based on seeing your behavior at that bar at STC in Dallas. (KIDDING! There was no bar incident. That I remember. And if there was, Larry probably wasn’t involved.)
There is definitely a corporate culture issue. Some organizations are more forgiving than others of “unique” employee interests. To pick a very recent example, what exactly is Google going to do with their employee, Wael Gholim, who was deeply involved in the Egyptian revolution?
Let me pick a different and less political example. I enjoy crocheting, and I’ve discovered a good number of others in tech comm who are knitters and crocheters. I’ve also discovered musical connections. These outside (irrelevant?) interests have helped us to forge stronger professional connections.
That is the advantage of Facebook et al. If you keep things very strictly professional, you lose the opportunity to form those bonds.
For myself, I recognize that making nasty comments about Glenn Beck runs the risk of alienating at least some potential clients. I am willing to take that risk and I acknowledge that it’s my responsibility. I think my situation is actually much clearer than an employee situation because you may not know how forgiving your employer is going to be. On the other hand, you are probably not assumed to be speaking for your organization at all times.
I think that an employee who posted truly offensive content on her personal blog would probably find herself without a job. But “truly offensive” is different from “political rant.”
I hope that I can separate “offensive” from “I don’t agree.”
Susan Modlin
Great post, Sarah. As usual, you’ve struck a nice balance. Working as I do for a social customer/community company, I blog and cross post to Facebook and Twitter for work. As a result, my personal and professional are thoroughly intertwined. This leads my friends to sometimes scratch their heads and wonder what the heck I’m talking about.
Likewise, my previous manager and most of the people I work with, including our CEO, all of whom are Facebook buddies, hear a lot about my weekend cottage, my dance activities, and the goings on at my temple. They are also treated to occasional doses of righteous indignation over the stupidity of certain ill-judged legislative crimes and misdemeanors and bad editorial choices by the NY Times magazine editor.
The key, as you’ve noted, is to keep it civil. Although I’m not remotely inclined to pull any punches where matter of principle are concerned, I do, however, acknowledge the responsibility to share my opinions without being offensive about it.
PS: I crochet too.
Kevin S.
I haven’t actually entered the professional world yet, but I’ve taken 90% of my Facebook profile private (including political and religious views) just to keep potential employers from throwing me out based on those things (I’m the dullest person in the world, so drunk party photos aren’t an issue). Of course, this means I have to be extra careful about who I friend on Facebook in order to keep that stuff private. But the first lesson, I would say, is learn Facebook’s privacy settings inside and out and keep up with the changes. There’s a bookmarklet/Firefox add-on called Better Privacy that helps with that.
Anindita Basu
Great post, Sarah.
My Facebook profile is as much private as FB lets it be (and I keep going back to the privacy settings to check if FB hasn’t sneaked in some all-visible setting while I was sleeping). That, plus FB lets you define “user groups” for your stuff – so, casual acquaintances never get to even read my status messages where I snort at our politicians and at religious stuff. Twitter, however, was a bit of a problem – everything is visible to everyone. That, and who’s ‘following’ me kept me from tweeting about stuff I am crazy about – Hindi films, e.g. – but which would be irrelevant to 80% of the people on my list (audience analysis). Three weeks ago, I got myself another Twitter account – a less serious account. So my strategy – for Facebook, I am using progressive disclosure; for Twitter, I’ve gone schizophrenic.
As I see it, I wouldn’t say (or do) anything on Facebook and Twitter and my blog that I wouldn’t otherwise do in public (that’s your point about not being idiots 🙂 ). It’s like, if at the STC annual conference when I’m standing there outside in the corridors and giggling with my friends, and if I say “Glenn Beck has lost it” (unlikely. I dont know who Glenn Beck is) – there’s always this chance of someone overhearing that and forming an opinion about me based on that. I can live with that. I wouldn’t want it to be otherwise.
P.S. I know only slip stitch and sc.
Davide Rizzo
I also went for the drastic solution of having split online personalities, with a public profile for professional contacts and a private profile for personal matters. The latter is safely locked away and only available to a selected (un)lucky few. Not that I’m doing or writing anything illegal, but I prefer to err on the side of caution.
This doesn’t mean that some content can’t drift from one profile to the other, but first I listen to what my paranoid self has to say. 😉
sankara rajanala
agree.
my life is an open book which nobody wants to read
i have a web cam but even big brother is not interested in watching
O’K, sera sera, whatever will be will be
Mark Giffin
Good post Sarah. For academic interest, I tried to think of a couple counterparts to Glenn Beck on the other side. He is so visible that I think there really aren’t any full equivalents, but I did think of a couple that might serve. Too bad this is a public forum, otherwise I might share them.
Aaron
I make sure to completely separate personal from professional profiles in order to not mix business with pleasure. My “friends” will just have to put up with whatever I “like” and post. While the people who are connected to me via professional networks won’t have to put up with any of that as i keep professional things on LinkedIn or http://www.studentgenius.com