If your company has started using social media to reach customers, the media, and others, you’ve probably already considered the benefits of creating a social media policy for your employees. However, according to Neil Morrison, Group HR Director of Random House, who spoke in this month’s Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (CIPD) Social Media Conference, having a policy on social media use is an unrealistic attempt to control staff and displays a lack of trust.

In today’s world, businesses strive to establish trust with their customers, but very often neglect the need to cultivate trust in their own workplace. Economist John Helliwell researched the determinants of workplace happiness and found that trust is the greatest contributor, beating pay, workload, or perks. A one-point increase on the trust scale can mean the equivalent of the psychological benefits associated with a 40 per cent wage increase.

Neil Morrison told conference delegates that HR too often fell into the trap of relying on “dumb” policies influenced by legal advisers and that social media was one area where things should be done differently.

“In HR sometimes I think we have to feel in charge or we feel uncomfortable. I don’t think you should have a social media policy – I believe it is an area that’s very, very dangerous, and that’s based on the concept of trust. If you are high policy, high control, what you are saying to people is ‘we don’t trust you’. But the tiny minority of people who are going to misuse social media and do something silly are going to do it anyway,” he said.

Morrison added that maintaining productivity was “the single most stupid argument” for trying to restrict social media, as people have their own preferred ways of accessing information and that good management was the key. He argued that: “If somebody was reading the newspaper all day at work you wouldn’t respond by drawing up a newspaper policy.”

Matthew Davies, UK HR Director of Logica is also opposed to the idea of having a social media policy. “The idea of giving up control would have been anathema to me in HR when I started work. But the digital age is enabling conversation to take place, inside and outside a company, like never before. Logica recognised quite early on that control was no longer ours and it was our people who would play the biggest part in building our employer brand... whether you like it or not, that conversation is already happening,” he said.

“While social media might feel like the Wild West, that doesn’t mean you have to try to play the sheriff,” added Davies. Instead, the job of the employer is to participate in the conversation in an appropriate way. “That sometimes means saying as a company we are not perfect and admitting your mistakes.”

Supporting Morrison and Davies’s arguments, Matthew Hanwell, HR director, community and social media at mobile phone manufacturer Nokia, commented: “We have 60,000 employees across the world. We wanted a dialogue between employees and HR and I wanted to respond to staff questions within 24 hours.

“Now, using social media, employees say what they think and we know about it. It allows leadership to understand and address the strength of feeling. We want to move to openness and transparency, encouraging a challenging mindset – the bottom line results will come after.”

Zappos, the online shoe retailer, embraces trust as an essential ingredient in cultivating an enthusiastic and happy workplace. It made its initial debut at #23 on Fortune Magazine’s List of “100 Best Companies to Work for,” making it the highest-ranking initiate for the year 2009. For Zappos, trust is a core business value, established through a steadfast commitment to transparency. And one of the ways that Zappos champions trust within its organisation is by actively encouraging its employees to join Twitter; in fact, it offers a Twitter class as part of its employee orientation. With over 400 employees tweeting, Zappos social media policy is more of a non-policy: “Be real and use your best judgment.” Zappos believes in the power of social media networking, not just as a way to cultivate transparency, but also to empower employees and to strengthen ties within the organisation.

Sylvia Hammond, an experienced generalist HR practitioner and a Social Network Manager, Consulting Editor, in her article “ Do HR Policies on Social Media Miss the Point?” explained that each and every employee has the capacity to build the employer brand. In this regards, she states: “So changing from the Taylorist command and control like a machine approach to one that acknowledges the positive contribution that every single employees can make to build the company brand is what is required. Not a social media policy from the HR department.”

Finally, Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur.com, an online reputation monitoring site, and author of the book Radically Transparent, believes that even when an organisation does have a clear social media policy in place that provides more specifications as to what employees aren’t allowed to post, there is no guarantee that everyone will represent the company exactly in the way that the organisation wants. Beal believes that the more restrictions businesses place on their employees, the less space they are giving them to be an asset for their online reputation.

“If you have an employee blogging policy that has hundreds of restrictions, you’re stifling the ability for those employees to be ambassadors for the company,” he said.

Today, social media has been widely embraced by all kinds of organisations for its ability to increase collaboration and brand awareness as well as to drive down costs. And while some employers may feel more comfortable having a social media policy in place within their organisation, undoubtedly the most important thing is that employees are educated and trained adequately on how to use social networking tools effectively, in a safe and appropriate way, aware of the implications of what they say on their sites. Michael Reynolds, a dynamic and sought-after speaker for conferences, meetings, and trainings, believes it is a company issue.

“If you hire smart people with common sense and train them adequately to understand what their outcomes are, do you really need a social media policy? Or would you rather set them free to be creative and authentic? And if you don’t trust your employees, then why are they working for you? Please stop over-regulating, over-policing, and over-policy-ising your employees. If you trust them, you may just be pleasantly surprised,” he maintained.

Ms Camilleri is a researcher at the Foundation for Human Resources Development (FHRD)