Bad mouthing competition on SM

[HMSSophie]

If a manager took to LinkedIn to denigrate a competitor company, using their work role to post, ie your company name was linked to the comment, would you consider this gross misconduct?

What about if they created an "alias" persona and used that to gain information from your competitor and the competitor found out and complained to you about it?

Bit stuck on my feelings about this!

Of course it is.

It could be. Or it could not be. It's potentially bringing the business into disrepute, which is usually listed as gross misconduct. But just because something could be gross misconduct doesn't mean it has to be. It wouldn't be unreasonable of a business owner to dismiss the person, but it would also be within a range of reasonable responses to give a warning. Might depend on their record, their value to the business, their role, their motivation, a variety of factors.

As a manager it isn't the type of behaviour I would expect. It shows extremely poor judgement to do something like that in such a public arena as social media, especially linking themselves and their own profile to their company.

Unfortunately far too many people take leave of their senses as regards their SM postings, and forget how open it is to scrutiny!

Who are you in this OP? Do you have to make a decision on what response you take?

If so I would call a meeting and show evidence of the posting to that employee and give them right to reply before taking anything further. Document the meeting and keep it on their record that the discussion took place incl date. Then if you need to escalate the fact due to repeat behaviours, it gives you a strong case to have shown it's a pattern of behaviour that you'd already cautioned the employee about.

I doubt whether one such event would cause your company to collapse but repeated slurs could have a damaging effect on reputation, especially at a time like this with the fragile economy we are in.

Our code of conduct, which everyone gets refreshers on ever year and signs up to, would make that gross misconduct.