Ali Riaz has 126 friends on his Facebook account. Ten of them are his employees.Riaz does not mind befriending his staff members online - as long as they initiate the process. "I don't want to impose," said Riaz, chief executive of Attivio, a software company in Newton, Massachusetts. "Everyone has a different definition of what is personal and private. There is a line there, but it's a wiggly line. Whenever you are in a power position, you have to be careful."
Networking sites like MySpace and Facebook introduce people to new friends and expand their cybercircles of pals. But they are also introducing people to a sticky etiquette issue that is becoming more common: What if your boss wants to be your buddy?
That can be an awkward intersection for people who try to keep their personal spaces and their workplaces separate. But as professional and personal worlds increasingly collide online, it is becoming harder to escape the boss's reach after hours.
Here's why this is sticky - Facebook asks for the employer. If a participant enters that information online, it makes it easy for the employer to find such employees on their service. If the employee is actually using the employer as a way to define themselves on Facebook, they are displaying their behavior on Facebook as one of a company's employee, and opening themselves up for contact by other employees of the company, including the boss.
Facebook doesn't give users the option of putting in their profession WITHOUT their employer. If Facebook would do this, it would help out in this arena. As a former boss, I think the rule is pretty easy to figure out - no initiated contact of employees through Facebook that do not list their employer. Employees need to have their space away from the office. So give it. Employees should figure out that if they display their employer's name on their profile, the employer may be interested in what is being posted. It's that simple.