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 I am already blessed beyond anything I deserve, with a wonderful wife and family, good health, dear friends, work that I love,  all the material things I need, and most of the material things I want, I find that my list of Christmas wishes digs, in some cases, deeply into the realm of the trivial, and in other cases, the seemingly unattainable. I, like many others, wish for peace in the world, the elimination of poverty, and that my Jacksonville Jaguars would have a winning season. But if I could sit down and make a list of wishes this Christmas, it might look like this:

I wish that people would:

• forever ban the use of the following phrases from their language:

1. the fact of the matter is
2. to a person
3. I’m reaching out to you
4. “I was like,” when they mean “I said”
5. “No problem,” when they mean “You’re welcome.”
6. At the end of the day
7. Does that make sense?

• stop referring to the “Queen of England”. She’s the “Queen of the United Kingdom”, or the “Queen of Britain”, which probably sounds better and is easier to comply with. What about Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland? We don’t say Barack Obama is the president of Hawaii, do we? I told you this was trivial.
• use their turn signals.
• speak more quietly on their mobile phones in public.
• learn when to use “Reply All” on emails, which is almost never.
• know what they want when they’re in front of me at Starbucks.

I wish the graphics operators at my local TV station would learn to spell, and to proofread what they put on the screen.

…that the socks I put into the laundry in pairs would come out as such.

…that my stapler had a gauge on it so that my first indication of its being empty would be something other than clamping down with a staple-less stapler.

…that Microsoft Windows was better than it is. Please don’t tell me to switch to a Mac to solve the problem. I know, I know…

…that I could figure out how using Twitter would help my business.

…that I could make better naan bread.

…that fast food restaurants were.

…that people were less uptight about the phrase “Merry Christmas”.

…that I could consistently remember where I put my sunglasses.

…that there weren’t so many things in my life that rely on batteries.

And I wish that our elected representatives would do a better job of representing us, and would behave with greater civility toward each other and people who disagree with them. I told you some of these were probably unattainable.

That’s really about it. Like I said, I’m lucky…very lucky. But as long as we’re wishing, those are my wishes.

And finally, I wish that everyone reading this has a Merry Christmas, if you celebrate Christmas, and that everyone has a blessed and prosperous 2010. That’s something we can all celebrate.

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.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that my good friend and business partner, Bill Catlette, and I don’t agree on everything. That’s part of what’s allowed our partnership to endure for going on 14 years.

As relates to yesterday’s post, One Button, Under Scrutiny at Home Depot, Bill, whose pedigree in HR goes back 35 years, pointed out, constructively, that in this case, HD really had no choice but to tell Trevor he couldn’t wear his button (although there’s still the problem with the tacit approval of it for more than a year before that, but that only support’s Bill’s point.)

Quoting Bill, “HD’s position is likely based on a ‘no solicitation policy’ that was enacted specifically to keep employees from wearing pro-union buttons/pins during a representation election campaign. The sad reality from a legal perspective is that, if you let people wear a ’1 Nation Under God’ button, you lose the ability to prevent them from wearing a ‘Vote Teamsters’ button.”

Bill’s right, especially the “sad reality” part. It’s kind of like the story of Zachary Christie, the 6-year-old Newark, Delaware student who was nearly suspended for 45 days for innocently bringing a Boy Scout camping implement to school. Only after a public hue and cry about the absurdity of the district’s zero-tolerance policy did administrators decide that a more reasoned approach was probably more helpful.

You and I can’t do much to change big corporate or government policies, and in some cases, these policies are the unfortunately necessary by-product of the times we’re living in. But – we can sure do something about our own policies, rules, judgments, and decisions. My November resolution is to put a little more thought into the application of some of my own rules – at home and at work – in other words, to do a better job of exercising judgment and discretion, rather than just blindly applying the rules. Want to join me?

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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.

We’ve recently witnessed a rash of boorish public behavior by people who should know better. Without naming names, let’s just say that athletes, actors, and politicians of every stripe have been well represented. Time will tell whether society is willing to accept this latest ratcheting up of coarse behavior as the new norm.

I wonder if perhaps we should adopt a color-coded “national civility index” to match the TSA’s threat meter. Think of the fun we could have with that. It would give tennis players and politicians alike something to shoot for. In the meantime, something more important is at stake, the afterwords from these outbursts – the eh hmm ‘apologies’.

Sadly, the ‘apologies’ that accompany these episodes seldom pass the smell test for authenticity. “Party leaders told me to call and say I was sorry” said one apologist. “I apologize to anyone who may have been offended” said another, whose offense involved getting off two f-bombs while describing what she would like to do with a tennis ball. Another issued an apology only after having twice denied the misbehavior. One had his agent issue an apology to his offended peeps. If anything is more offensive than the bad behavior, it just might be the apologies themselves.

This trend is bothersome not just because of its unpleasantness, but because in a lot of cases, impressionable children and young adults are viewing this as a template for acceptable behavior. The payoff isn’t pretty. In a recent survey of teens by the Josephson Institute, 64% admitted cheating on tests, 30% admitted stealing something from a store, 83% copped to lying about something significant to their parents, and, drumroll please… 93% said that they were okay with their own values. The notion that you can get away with pretty much anything as long as you mumble something loosely construed to be an apology puts us way down a slippery slope.

I have gained some experience at making apologies. It’s nothing to brag about, just a by-product of screwing up on a pretty regular basis, and getting more practice. And more importantly, because I had parents who took the hard road and made certain that I got this lesson right. One summer when I was a kid, I subbed for a friend on his paper route. Everything was fine until early one Sunday morning when I launched a tightly rolled Charleston Daily Mail through two layers of glass in a customer’s front door. I quickly learned from my parents that “service recovery” consisted of more than a simple apology. At a reasonable hour when the homeowner was likely to be up and wanting his newspaper, my dad made sure that I returned to the scene to sweep up the broken glass, replace the original paper, and make a sincere apology. Then, I got the chance to “make it right” by paying for the installation of replacement glass in the storm door. As I recall, that wiped out my profits for the month, but left me with a valuable life lesson. Thanks, Dad.

Recovering from one’s mistakes isn’t just the right thing to do. On both a personal and institutional level, it’s also good for business. I was reminded of this recently by a client whose company had shipped some off-spec product to their customers. He remarked that several customers had actually called to commend them for their prompt and thorough handling of the matter. In each case, the customers expressed appreciation that his team had reacted quickly, apologized in person, and then taken action guided not by what was legally required, but what was right. Hmm.

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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