my father keeps responding to my employee’s Facebook posts
A reader writes:
My father keeps responding to my employee’s political posts on Facebook. My father is very conservative and my employee is very liberal, so you can guess that their opinions go together like oil and water. I feel that it is inappropriate for my father to be interacting with someone I supervise, and I asked him to stop. He feels that Facebook is a public forum, and that the fact that I supervise someone should not deny his right to respond to a public post.
(Before I became this person’s manager, I was friends with him on Facebook. When I became his manager, I did not unfriend him, just stopped interacting on his posts, and let him know I’d be doing that. At some point, though, he and my father friended each other, but it was almost certainly because they were both connected to me. I realize now I should have completely cut the Facebook connection/unfriended this employee at the beginning. Lesson learned!)
While the posts in question are political, I would feel uncomfortable with my father interacting with any of my employees over Facebook, no matter how innocuous the topic. It feels like it crosses boundaries. Should I mention to my employee that he is welcome to block my father if he wishes? Or should I stay out of it because Facebook is a public forum, and this is outside and unrelated to work?
For some context: The employee knows this is my father. My father is retired and has no relationship at all to my workplace. My employee has never mentioned my father’s Facebook responses at work.
I answer this question — and three others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
Other questions I’m answering there today include:
- My new hire backed out before starting
- Can I ask my employee to connect me to her husband, who I want to network with?
- How to recommend someone when my last recommendation went wrong
