The Social Saboteur

You’re the HR Director of your company, and the boss has never been prouder. Under your management you’ve assembled a top notch team. The front office runs smooth and efficiently. The warehouse crew is an efficient, well-oiled machine.

The hard work has paid off. The boss applauds you: The company has grown rapidly and is a rising star in the industry. It has attracted prospective investors. There’s even talk of a merger that would benefit everyone in the firm.

Yet as the weeks go by, productivity begins to slip. A number of the warehouse workers get written up for blatant disregard of safety measures and protocols. Shipments start going out late. Suddenly, there is dissension in the ranks, and your well-oiled machine is grinding toward an all-out shutdown. You know what is at stake. Should this behavior continue, the entire merger could be in question… or worse.

Acting quickly to staunch this toxicity, you launch an internal investigation. Interviews with employees reveal some minor grumb

les but, for the most part, your troops remain tight-lipped. You can’t pry out of them the source of these troubles.

Desperate for a lead, you decide to re-check everyone’s social media accounts. You had done a quick review of each upon hiring, but since then there were other priorities. You and your team couldn’t be expected to watch everyone’s social media activity, day in and day out. There’s a company to run.

Sure enough, you find him—one of your forklift drivers. His tweets and Facebook posts going back the last few weeks rail against the company, latent with misinformation and vitriol. He calls out the overtime allocation process. Dismisses the safety protocols in place as “authoritarian” and “unnecessarily overbearing.” Pits the front office as “high and mighty,” reigning over the “working-class Joes” in the warehouse.

What’s worse is that, over the course of his postings, other workers from the warehouse have commented their agreement with the forklift driver. The same workers who have been discipline problems over this past stretch of time. Now there appears to be unified, online chatter amongst them about striking, a move that could cripple the company and ruin any chance of the merger.

Intercept Potential Situations

As alarming as this situation is, what should be even more alarming is that the scenario could have been intercepted and adjudicated long before the dissension reached critical mass, all by implementing a simple and cost-effective social monitoring tool. By using Social Media Monitoring, existing confirmed sites for an individual, as well as any newly discovered sites or profiles, would have been reviewed and flagged for evidence of potential workplace threats—racism/intolerance, proclivity to violence, terrorism, toxic employee behavior, potentially illegal activity, sexually explicit material, and so on—thereby greatly increasing the chance for early intervention and protection against reputational risk.

Social Media Monitoring combines compliant screening practices with values-based goals to help protect one of your business’s greatest assets: your reputation. Our operational process combines technology with human review. Starting with the verification process, a subject’s personally identifying information is run through proprietary technology that scans social media sites for flagged content. Then, combining best practices of AI technology, analytic algorithms, and expert human analysis, TruView performs open source intelligence (OSINT) and/or social media screens for reputational risk. Keyword searches are customized for detrimental categories. Integrated with the back‐end of our TruView platform, social media searches are available for both one‐time screening and continuous monitoring, the latter of which could be employed against the scenario described above.

Social Media Monitoring is a scalable background screening solution that uses web and social data. We help companies leverage open source public content in their employment decisions without a messy, complicated workflow, all while remaining compliant with FCRA, EEOC, and data privacy laws. Combined with our TruView360 Risk-Based Intelligence suite of services—Continuous Criminal Monitoring, GeoFence Monitoring, Due Diligence investigations, and more—Social Media Monitoring can help you avoid disastrous damage to your reputation, prevent litigation, and even help preserve business transactions. Contact TruView today for a consult on how Risk-Based Intelligence services can work for you.