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Can I Protect My Trade Secrets With a Social Media Policy?
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By James Douglass
Everybody in the modern workforce is involved in social media in one way or another.
Think about it: Even if your company does not utilize social media (which is becoming less and less likely), it is almost certain that your company’s employees do.
Whether or not your company has a policy regarding social media is another matter. As is recommended, more than half of all employers now have formal social media policies in place. Sometimes these policies are simple, and state only that employees are not to engage in social media activities (i.e., surfing Facebook) while on company time.
Other policies are more comprehensive, and dictate what employees may or may not say about their employer, or reveal about their employer, via social media. It is the latter type of policy that has some employers running afoul of the National Labor Relations Board.
The problem arises when a company’s policy dictates that employees may not communicate, via social media, confidential or proprietary company information.
As a refresher, the NLRB is the federal agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRA grants nearly all private-sector employees (regardless of whether they are unionized or non-unionized) the right to act together to improve their wages or working conditions.
More specifically, the NLRB protects the rights of employees to engage in “concerted activity,” which is when two or more employees take action for their mutual aid or protection regarding terms and conditions of employment. A single employee may also engage in protected concerted activity if he or she is acting on the authority of other employees, bringing group complaints to the employer’s attention, trying to induce group action, or seeking to prepare for group action.
From the NLRB’s website, some examples of protected concerted activities are:
Amazingly, the NLRB has taken the position that many social media policies, which are (in part) intended to protect company trade secrets and confidential information from dissemination via social media, could be interpreted as prohibiting employees from discussing and disclosing information regarding their own conditions of employment, as well as the conditions of employment of employees other than themselves – activities that are protected by Section 7 of the NLRA.
The NLRB restates this position via its most recent effort to clarify its stance on social media. On May 30, 2012, the Board’s Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon released a third report summarizing seven different cases involving employers’ social media policies, confidentiality, privacy, protection of employer information, and intellectual property.
In the first six policies reviewed, the report concludes that at least some of the provisions in the employers’ policies and rules are overbroad, and therefore unlawful under the NLRA. Only one social media policy, out of seven included in the report, is found to be entirely lawful.
As pointed out by various blogsand legal experts, the report contradicts itself in dictating what policy verbiage violates the NLRA. For example, the Board finds (on page 8 of the report) that a social media policy prohibiting employees from disseminating “[Employer] Secret, Confidential or Attorney-Client Privileged information” is lawful. In comparison, the report finds the following policies to be in violation of the NLRA:
So how can an employer draft a social media policy that protects its confidential, proprietary, and trade secret information, while simultaneously complying with the NLRA? Notably, the Report does find one policy entirely lawful. Why was it lawful? According to the NLRB, the policy:
(A copy of the lawful policy is attached to the report on page 22.)
To summarize, the NLRB seems to have a problem with ambiguous, all-encompassing policies that, while drafted with the lawful intention of protecting trade secret or otherwise protected information, could be interpreted as prohibiting employees from engaging in concerted activity.
Thus, if drafting a social media policy, it should be specific, use numerous examples, keep a narrow scope, and make it abundantly clear to employees what is being prohibited and why. It would also be wise to utilize direct quotes from the policies included in the Report that the NLRB found to be lawful.
This was originally published on Fisher & Phillips Non-Compete and Trade Secrets blog.