Hi, my name is JR Conlin, and i work for <CENSORED>.
Actually, i can’t do that anymore. You see, one of the reasons that i’ve never come out and publicly stated the company i work for is because they had a fairly strict media relationship policy that prevented it. That changed today.
Please understand that this is a major point. Companies are EXTREAMLY sensitive about ANY information that regards them. Analysts look for any reason what-so-ever to either improve or drop a company’s stock rate, which effects it’s credit rating, which effects the amount of available reserve income it has. Plus, negative info long outlives positive, as the staff at Newsweek can attest to.
The fact that Yahoo! not only recognizes that employees have voices, but are actually letting them talk is still relatively unprecedented. Only a handful of other companies, and only one or two other large companies have any sort of employee blog guidelines. Of those, many are simply reworks of the existing “No Company Information” policies that effectively silence the drones.
Yahoo!’s policy is wonderfully transparent:
- We’re not going to save your ass.
- You still work for us, so don’t blab secrets or we’ll hurt you.
- Get someone smarter to do follow ups with money people.
- Be nice to the people you spend eight++ hours a day with.
- Get your facts straight BEFORE you post.
- “It Sucks” is not a good post.
- Blab about everything and nobody will like you.
Basically, there’s no surprises in this document, and it pretty much spells out “common sense” things for folks.
For what it’s worth, it actually meshes fairly well with my own policies toward talking about my fellow employees and employer. (No, i’m not going to talk about Project Clamdigger before we release it, but if you’re checking out some cute chick in the salad bar line and walk smack into the COO, oh you better believe i’m blogging that.) And no, i’m not going to help you with your problem using anything other than the stuff i work on. i’ll help you figure out how to get an answer a little faster, and how to give the folks that actually DO work on that thing as much information to help them identify the problem as you can, but unless i have time and access to get my little fingers into the code, you’re wasting your breath.
i’d also love if more companies realized that their biggest asset is really their biggest asset. People want to hear from real people. As a company, you just need to let them know what your concerns are and where they should be careful. You hired smart people who are excited about where they work. Let them share some of that enthusiasm. i would be very happy to see more companies establish similar guidelines and be more open. (Well, that or keep up the walls and suffocate themselves. That’d be nice too.)
So, in a time when everyone harps about the importance of “Innovation”, i’m damn glad to see my company doing even more of it, even if the SlashKids will never agree.
Hi, my name is JR Conlin and i work for <CENSORED> (Will you cut that out‽)
i work for Yahoo!.
