Should You Friend Your Boss On Facebook?
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Should you friend your boss on Facebook or other social media sites? What about colleagues? What do you do when your superior sends you a request? We haven't talked about Facebook and bosses for a long time, so I thought we'd revisit.
While there are still a ton of amusing stories of people getting fired when their boss saw stupid stuff on Facebook (Buzzfeed, HappyPlace), a recentish (2014) study says that adding your boss to your social networks can have advantages (Time).
For my $.02, I agree with most of the experts: privacy controls are HUGE here.
I keep a variety of different friend lists anyway — one very small one for my BFFs, a general one for my friends, one for parent-friends (so I don't annoy my single/childless friends with a bunch of baby questions), and one for Brooklyn friends (so I don't annoy friends elsewhere if I see a good deal somewhere local).
To be honest, I'd probably keep my boss off all of them but the general one for my friends.
LinkedIn can be another ball of wax — it can be a great job-search tool, but it's tough to use it if your boss is already your friend. (Here's our last guide to using LinkedIn secretly, as well as some of our review of the best LinkedIn settings for jobhunting.)
What about the other social media sites — Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, etc, etc — how liberally do you use those as ways to connect with your friends (versus using them without much expectation of connection with your friends, such as pinning a million different ideas to Pinterest for a home renovation project or something, or using Twitter as a newsfeed). Do you often send things to Facebook from the other social media sites?
Ladies, what are your thoughts? Have you friended your boss and other colleagues on social media? (Do you think less of people who seem to be on all the time, or use it solely for whining or boasting?) If you ARE the boss, what's your take on it?
Some must-read business books for women — update coming soon!
Photo credit: Shutterstock/Nicolesa.
My personal policy is that I am not Facebook friends with anyone I work with. No exceptions. I’m not really concerned about work colleagues seeing things I don’t want them to see (I think I last posted something on FB in 2012?), but it’s just not worth the hassle and potential stress of trying to decide which friend requests to accept, ignore, etc.
Ditto, but my policy extends to include anyone I know via work (ex: clients). Only exception is my husband’s best friend of almost 20 years who works w/me; they predate our working relationship so I’m not worried on that front.
This. All I post are vacation photos and photos of my dog so I don’t really care who sees it but nobody at work (large law firm) “friends” colleagues. LinkedIn is the social network for work.
+2
+1.
I want to follow this policy. But what do you do when someone at work friend requests you? People get offended by this kind of stuff. Silly, I know, but I still need to maintain good working relationships with people.
You just ignore it. Honestly. People who get upset about it need to deal with that themselves.. not for you to compromise your standards/beliefs about it in order to accommodate their immaturity.
Just for a counterpoint, I work in a creative field and am friends on Facebook with several coworkers and my direct manager. I joined Facebook in 2005 and weathered the transition to the News Feed. I learned early on that I won’t post anything I wouldn’t want anyone to see.
Consequently, I mostly post pictures of my cats.
Just another counterpoint..
I think it’s a know-your office situation. In my industry, it’d be weird to not accept requests from people you work with.
We also have a lot more bleed between work/home/personal life anyway, so this goes along with it.
my boss friended me on FB. She’s been pretty blurry with boundaries in the entire 2 years she’s managed me (we used to be peers), but to date, all have been to my direct benefit. I use the fact that she’s my FB friend as a good gut-check for what I actually post of FB. If I don’t want my father-in-law or boss reading it, I shouldn’t be posting it.
I had a bad experience with this at my last firm – this was when Facebook was taking off, and before LinkedIn was popular. So everyone FB-friended each other. Including my boss, who was challenged with boundaries anyways. She was someone who would glom onto you and really try to be a BFF. She’d ask all kinds of questions about my posts and photos. I think her intentions were good, but it creeped me out.
Since then, I am at a different firm, and do not have any of my current work colleagues as Facebook friends, period. And it’s not a common practice at my firm anyways – people are more active as LinkedIn connections.
I am FB friends with my boss and most of my co-workers because it is pretty common at our office. At this point I have so many of my husband’s relatives as friends that I’m already pretty picky about what I post–mostly just vacation pictures and pictures of my son. It makes me feel good when someone at the office comments on a cute picture of my kid they’ve seen on FB.
One of the reasons I don’t “friend” people from work on FB is that I also worry about them seeing things or pictures that other people post to my wall. For example, every once in a while, someone will link a really political article to my wall, or something that we think is funny, but might be viewed as risque or immature or offensive or whatever by a boss or colleague. (Or I might post an article about something very controversial and want to vent about it without worrying about offending a boss or colleague.) It’s easier to just keep that aspect of my personal life separate from work. I also don’t trust the privacy settings. My husband is a schoolteacher and when his students “friend” him, he used to accept the invitation, but put them under a special list where they could only see, say, his profile picture. A few years ago FB did an update on its privacy policies — and overnight, his students could see EVERYTHING that his regular friends could see. Luckily, no harm was done — but clearly the privacy policy updates etc. can have some bugs that make it risky to rely on categories of “friends.”
I use an alias on FB. I did that because I don’t want clients trying to freiend me and I have a unique name, so it wouldn’t be hard to find me on FB if I used it.
Two of the admin people at work have specifically (to my face) asked to friend me on FB, as has my asssitant. I’m fine with it, I don’t post anything ont here I’d be worried about any of them seeing.
Bored to tears, really, as I mostly post pics of my kids.
This is hard. I am 31, and have been on FB since 2005, when I was in college. As a professional, I’ve never used an alias or anything, and aside from some privacy settings, I am basically willing to accept any co-worker’s friend request. I don’t use FB that much, however, and I definitely don’t post drunken pictures or political commentary. I agree with what some other posters have said — having co-workers and in-laws as FB friends helps me to make sure that I don’t post things that I’ll later regret.
I also feel like being “open” with my FB page is kind of a proactive way to show that I have nothing to hide. I know that a lot of my friends use fake names or make themselves unsearchable when they’re looking for jobs. But, given that we all came up in the FB generation, I think if a co-worker or potential employer can’t find you through a name search, then they’re going to know that you’re trying to hide your profile, which (to me) leads to the question: what are you hiding?
So, I just try to keep it clean and enjoyable.
While I never take the first step friending a professional colleague on Facebook, I’m prepared to accept those requests. It absolutely can be used to build professional relationships, and I actually find it much more adaptable and user-friendly than LinkedIn.
Part of being an adult in 2015 is understanding how social media works. It is not going away. Navigating and understanding privacy settings is a pain, but it’s important. Many online services have privacy settings that default to sharing an incredible amount of information. (I’ve found job applicants’ Pinterest pages, RDIO pages, etc) and it pays to be savvy here. I take control of my internet presence, and treat monitoring it a necessary obligation, much like I monitor my credit report. Because I do this, I have no problem accepting friend requests and networking through Facebook.
If you don’t want someone seeing your Facebook page, maybe it’s time to rethink what you are putting out there for them to see.
I agree with this sentiment. I am friends with several fellow associates on facebook — mostly people who I am friendly with but don’t work with directly. I’ve been conscious to not friend request people who I have any sort of supervisor or subordinate relationship with, even when they are friends on FB with our mutual friends. I don’t friend request clients, even if we have mutual friends. Still, if anyone in those categories friend request-ed me, I’d probably accept if they asked.
I am, however, pretty facebook lame. I can’t think of much that would offend anyone — I mostly post kid pictures, occasional house pictures (I guess taking a picture of a nice house feature could make people jealous/think you have too much money?), observations/internet things that I think are funny, and very infrequently something a little political but generally mainstream & not at all radical. I also post maybe a few times a week (usually less) so volume of facebook updates doesn’t seem particularly offensive either. And I never, ever post about work unless it’s something very public and positive (e.g., an honor or a publicized win).
Disagree. Nothing on my page I wouldn’t necessarily want by boss to see… I like boundaries.
At my previous job, we were all FB friends with each other and each others spouses. None of us posts anything particularly controversial but we are all grown-ups about it anyway so it’s never been an issue.