I am aware of several cases where individual public servants have commented on a difficult personal situation they experienced with another agency and received an informal complaint, via their own senior management, from the senior management of the other agency (who had used social media monitoring to track them down). Generally the complaint was that by commenting in a less than positive manner they were calling the integrity and reputation of another agency into question.
This raises major considerations for public servants as they engage online personally or professionally. While it is very clear from the Australian Public Service Code that public servants should uphold the integrity and reputation of the public service, there is less clarity around whether public servants should comment on operational matters that affect them personally.
It also raises questions about the role and rights of public servants – can they possess all the rights of other citizens as well as act responsibly as employees of the government? Are they entitled to raise valid concerns about government operated services based on their and their family and friends’ personal experiences?
Here’s some examples to clarify the type of situations that I see may emerge:
- If a public servant is organising a passport for a family member and the process goes badly astray, can they comment online about the issues they experienced with the Department of Immigration?
- If a public servant finds traffic is slowed to a stand-still due to road works during peak hour, can they complain online about the Roads Authority?
- Finally, if a public servant is inappropriately treated by counter staff at a government shopfront, can they discuss their poor customer service experience online?
Over time there may be temptation for senior agency officials to attempt to shutdown this type of commenting by public servants, either by discouraging social media engagement or through staff education.
However as more public servants take to social media (and more social media users are employed by government), the frequency of these types of incidents is likely to grow.
I wonder how our systems will need to adapt.
This is crazy. Of course they should be able to comment online. Negative comments is probably at least 75% of online interaction. The agency or organization just has to sift through the BS to get to the real problems. Half the use for social media in agencies is to figure out what you are doing wrong and to remedy it. If you are censoring people public servants or not your whole outreach is doomed!
I think the 2nd paragraph, wherein you describe how the person who made the (probably legitimate) negative comment was ‘punished’ for it as well as his/her senior management chain gets at an important issue.
If government is going to be open and receptive to comments/suggestions/criticisms from citizens/customers (which it SHOULD), that includes being open and receptive to the same from their own employees, because their employees are in fact both a subset of their citizens/customers AND likely to be aware of many more situations that can/should be improved along with potential solutions. This story indicates that the institution being complained about has senior management in place who thinks it’s a more worthy use of their time to ‘track down’ somebody complaining than it is to address their issue; more focus on ‘sticking together right or wrong’ than about doing the right. Is it analagous to the thin blue line, where a policeman might not speak up about another policeman’s illegal or unethical actions because of fear of blowback from their own?
Let’s face it, part of the problem inside government is precisely that too often, employees are NOT listened to or work in a wierd culture of fear/intimidation and don’t bother to speak out anymore. Effectively, we train employees that we don’t care about their opinions so don’t bother voicing them because it will have no effect; same training we’ve done to citizens for a lot of years. But internally, this results in decrease in morale, productivity and worse service (both internally and externally).
So – it’s the response of all the managers (both those at the agency that received the negative feedback AND those at the agency where the commenter worked who funneled that complaint back DOWN to him/her) that is the real problem here. Because that’s the kind of stuff that CREATES a lousy work environment and reinforces a perception of “I am gov, I am always right, and your complaining/requesting is invalid in the first place and I will not treat it or you with respect’. Essentially, the same attitude that leads citizens to mistrust gov in the first place.
A
customerstake holder is a stake holder regardless of their background. Although this type of incident, or variations of same, is likely to grow much more common, as more organizations come onto the social networking scene.A couple of months ago the blog universe was “full” of the reaction to a employee of company A lodged a complaint against what he believed was another company and the feedback that he received from his management when they found that the employee had complained about a subsidiary of the parent company he worked for…
Another example is a local city government nominated an individual for a high ranking position and reacted rather strangely when a comment was posted on the City’s website questioning the nomination because of questionable legal activity by the nominee. The city’s reaction was that they could not investigate the issue because of the anonymous nature of the comment/complaint. The blog universe, whether rightly or wrongly, has indicated that the comment was made by an employee of another city department who posted the comment out of fear of loosing their job.
Not sure whom I should be more angry with, in the case Mr. Thomler brings up, the agency who complains to the stakeholder’s management in another agency or the stakeholder’s management for not telling complaining agency that this probably was NOT the correct way to approach the problem.
In my opinion – professional courtesy says you should try to do it “in-house” if you can but if you don’t know who to contact then public comments are the only resort. At that point you are commenting as any citizen.