In what may ultimately prove a landmark decision on workplace privacy, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week that government workers have no right to privacy when using employer-owned communications devices. The case stemmed from a suit brought by an Ontario, CA police officer whose extremely personal text messages (not all of which were directed to his wife) were exposed during an audit of the business vs. personal usage of his city-owned device.

My first thought was, what on earth was this guy thinking when, rather than quietly reimburse the City for the personal messages, he opted to file suit on grounds of unlawful search?

My second thought was, and is, that, though the Court restricted its ruling to government employees using government-owned devices, the ruling will undoubtedly spill over and have a chilling affect on private enterprise as well, and not necessarily in the expected manner.

Employees have been extensively using employer-owned wireless devices and communications networks for better than a decade. During that time there has been something of an uneasy truce as we have each allowed the line between business and personal time/pursuits to blur. To an ever greater extent, workers (at all levels) have permitted more frequent invasion of what has traditionally been their private, off-duty, personal space. It is no longer unusual at all to have one’s off-duty time peppered with business related messages, queries, and conference calls. Once the sole realm of managers who ostensibly were being paid for such interruptions, today, workers at all levels and pay grades are involved. In turn, employers have seen, and largely acquiesced to a greater co-mingling of personal with professional activities in the workspace.

Though there has been (and always will be) some tension in this arrangement, if we (manager types) are not careful, the Court’s ruling could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and disrupts what is otherwise a pretty good thing.

Some managers and organizations will use the Court’s ruling as an excuse to more aggressively police and restrict non-sanctioned use of company devices and networks. Doing so would be a mistake. How?

By and large, we have been the beneficiaries of this arrangement, where, within reason, we get free (yes) access to team members, regardless of whether they are technically on or off duty. In a world where speed of thought, response, and execution reigns supreme, this advantage is worth a lot to us. The very second that our workers decide to either turn the device off, or demand compensation for the time when it is turned on, thus making them accessible, we have lost a lot of ground. This is a decision that each of them can make at any time, quietly, and without notice. When you get down to it, we face a simple high school physics problem… There are more of them than us. This is no time to get stupid.

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A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

As a sign of just how co-mingled our private and business lives have become, the U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear a case regarding the privacy (or lack thereof) of personal text messages transmitted by a California police officer over a device owned by his employer, the City of Ontario. According to an article in USA Today,  “Ontario city officials are appealing a lower court’s decision that a police department violated a sergeant’s constitutional protection against unreasonable searches when it reviewed his texts, some of them sexually explicit.”

For decades, everyone pretty well understood the de facto standard to be that “work time was for work.” Translation – whatever took place during working hours on the employer’s premises/property, or when conducting business for the employer was expected to be work related, and that there were very few, if any, rights to privacy, or even ownership of one’s thoughts and ideas, if conceived at work. At the same time, one’s off duty hours were their own, and but for an infrequent, quick phone call, if you wanted to interrupt someone’s time off, you were expected to pay for it.

And then along came Jones, ‘er the cellphone, the laptop, globalization, always-on connectivity, and the expectation that workers of every stripe could be reached out to any time, anywhere. And reach out we did (and still do). Though unspoken, until now, the operating premise has been that is generally okay for workers to carry on personal business at work in an amount roughly equivalent to the degree that they are called upon to involve themselves in work activities during their “off hours.” It’s an uneasy truce, but a truce nevertheless.

To date, there have been only two lines in the sandbox: 1) That there should be no appreciable extra cost associated with the cross-over activities, and 2) That the law is still the law, and normal standards of decency still apply. In other words, whereas it’s probably alright to take a few minutes to order a new pair of shoes online at Zappos.com from your employer’s computer, it’s not okay to engage in online gambling or look at salacious images.

So where do we go?

As for the court case, my bet is that, despite a right-leaning bench, the Court will side with the cop, if only for the reason that employees were required to reimburse the city if they exceeded allowable text character limits.

More broadly speaking, I see organizations going in a couple of different directions. Some will undoubtedly take steps to further delineate via policy, what the rights and expectations are. Given the untrusting, transactional nature of the relationship in many workplaces, the new deal could bring about further unbundling of the relationship. In an increasing number of cases, the devices (phones, pagers, pda’s) will be owned by the worker while the voice/data plan will be reimbursed by the employer. With regard to the broader co-mingling of personal and business activities, some of these organizations will prescribe varying time limits that they and their employees can “bother one another” during the course of the day.

Realizing that it’s good for people to regularly unplug from their jobs, some organizations will take a step back and actually encourage workers to just turn the damned thing off when they’re at home and don’t want to be bothered, and instruct their bosses to leave them alone.

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A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

You finally get approval to fill that long-vacant position – the opening that has taken your team to the brink of burnout. You spend nights and weekends reviewing the pile of applicants, and narrow it down to someone who looks like a superstar. They’ve got the experience, the education, the specialized certifications, terrific references, and, most important of all – they’re an exceptionally good fit for your company and your team.

But, and this is a big but – they’ve got a bad credit score. So HR tells you no. You can’t hire them.

There are lots of good reasons not to hire someone. Usually – bad credit alone isn’t one of them. And yet, it’s become the reason du jour, in the eyes of many, to disqualify an otherwise highly qualified person to do a job they’re particularly well suited for. And it makes us wonder (although not for very long, really) if some employers might be taking undue advantage of the current imbalance in the labor supply/demand ratio.

A March 2 Associated Press article by Kathleen Miller says, “Sixty percent of employers recently surveyed by the Society for Human Resources Management [SHRM] said they run credit checks on at least some job applicants, compared with 42 percent in a somewhat similar survey in 2006.”

I get the arguments: People with money woes are more tempted to steal from their employer. Bad financial decisions mean bad judgment at work. (Try telling someone “You’ve made too many bad spouse choices, so we’re not hiring you.” See how far that gets you with the judge.) SHRM likes to point to a study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners that found that the two most common red flags for employees who commit workplace fraud are 1. living beyond their means, and 2. having difficulty meeting financial obligations. Well, no duh. They needed a study to figure that out?

And the counter from the social humanitarian everybody-deserves-a-job bunch is “how can you get out of debt if no one will give you a job?” It’s as if they think employers are somehow obligated to put people on their payrolls to pay some social duty.

And employers who use the practice will point out that it’s perfectly legal (which it is, in most US states), and besides, you can’t run a credit check without the applicant’s permission. Yeah, right. Like the applicant who refuses permission has any hope of being hired.

The real problem with giving too much weight to a job applicant’s credit score is that, in too many cases, it’s simply a faulty filter. OK – I’m not a complete idiot. For most bank jobs, jobs in accounting and finance, those who handle money, C-level positions, and those with greater opportunity to commit fraud – employers have an obligation to be duly diligent in bettering their odds against would-be miscreants. But for the vast majority of jobs that fall outside that realm, credit score is no better a predictor of (honest) job success than are race, gender, marital status, religion, or national origin. And didn’t we outlaw that a long time ago?

Did somebody say outlaw?

Yep. As in so many cases, when organizations (or individuals) can’t be relied upon to behave like grown-ups on their own, the law steps in. Wisconsin, South Carolina, Oregon, and thirteen other states are currently considering bans on most pre-employment credit checks.

What to do?

Employers:

• Beware of using faulty filters…like credit checks, and other sieves that let can let bad hires in, and keep good ones out.
• Start looking at hiring quality for what it is: a competitive issue. These days, the company with the best talent wins. So what if the best talent went through a messy divorce that trashed her credit, or was eaten alive by medical bills from his child’s serious chronic illness? The one with the best talent still wins. This stuff’s too important to rely on arbitrary standards.
• Realize that hiring is one of the most important jobs any manager does. And one of the hardest. It may sound attractive to relegate the hard work of hiring to automated resume scanners, exams and assessments, and credit checks, but in the end, there’s no substitute for taking a hard look at the things that really matter, going eyeball-to-eyeball with the prospect, using judgment and your powers of discernment, and making a well-informed decision.
• If you do check credit, and find something of concern, on someone you think would be good in the job, give them a chance to explain. And then listen.

Applicants:

• As if you needed one more reason to maintain a clean credit record, this is one.
• Unless pre-employment credit checks are prohibited where you live, be prepared for the scrutiny. Just as you would if showing your home to a prospective buyer, tidy up your credit record before you put your career on the market.
• Know your credit score, and examine your credit record. If there’s an error, U.S. residents can visit the Federal Trade Commission’s website to learn step-by-step how to dispute and correct the error.
• This issue underscores the value of investing in networking, long before you may need it. Chances are, if the prospective employer has some history with you, or valued connection to you, your credit score may matter a whole lot less.

Happy hunting…on both sides.

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Richard Hadden (twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows) is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, and the followup Contented Cows MOOve Faster.

The US Census Bureau is witnessing, firsthand, one of the consequences of the bad economy. Very much unlike the last time it was in heavy recruiting mode (1989-90), the supply of talented, qualified, educated, and eager workers for the decennial project is plentiful.

USA Today quotes US Census Bureau Director Robert Groves (not to be confused with Defense Secy Robert Gates or Press Secy Robert Gibbs), as saying “The horrible recession has benefited us in an indirect way — our applicant pool contains a set of people with experience and background and training that is unprecedentedly rich”.

And so does yours… if you’re recruiting. And smart employers are ALWAYS recruiting, whether they’re hiring or not.

Here’s what those same smart employers know, are learning, or will learn from this:

• Just because there are more people in the pool doesn’t mean it’s easier to spot the best swimmers. In fact, in many cases, an oversupply of labor makes the job of hiring – and hiring well – even harder. Whenever you hear the words “inundated” and “applications” in the same sentence, you can be pretty sure of hearing the words “it was just a bad fit” being uttered not too far down the road.
• This is a case where hi-tech has to be paired with hi-touch. If you over-delegate this core leadership function to so-called smart selection systems, or to HR (whose job it is to help, not do it for you) – or if you don’t – you’ll get what you deserve.
• These days, making the right choice is as important as ever, because making the wrong choice shows up more than when the economy is on a firmer footing. Prosperity insulates against lots of bad decisions, including bad hires.
• Relying on (hoping for?) an “any port in a storm” mentality on the part of the unemployed workforce is a great way to miss the recovery. Pre-recovery is precisely the time you don’t want to foul the gene pool with “just anyone”. The best applicants will still discriminate with respect to employer reputation. Don’t let your competitors get the good ones – and they’re out there.

Richard Hadden (twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows) is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk, and the followup Contented Cows MOOve Faster. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the HR Raging Debates microsite developed by Halogen Software, in which a group of us were privileged to opine on issues like Forced Ranking, Performance Appraisals, and Generational Leadership. It was a huge success! Now we’re taking it live.

Tomorrow (Tuesday December 15th) at 2:30pm EST (GMT -5), we’ll be doing a live webinar with many of the guests in the series including:

• Josh Bersin
• Kris Dunn
• David Creelman
• Lance Haun
• Ed Lawler
• Libby Sartain
• and me

You can register for the webinar here. Join us, and let’s stir things up a little!

Richard Hadden (twitter at http://twitter.com/rehadden) is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.