Ron Schiller, former vice president for fundraising for National Public Radio (NPR), resigned on March 8, 2011 after a conversation with undercover investigators was recorded on tape and then posted on the Internet. The meeting was job-related; the investigators were pretending to be considering a $5 million donation to NPR.
Mr Schiller confided political opinions to his supposed donors; because his opinions violated NPR’s standards for political neutrality, NPR’s Senior Vice President of Marketing, Communications and External Relations, Dana Davis Rehm, explicitly distanced the organization from his opinions: “We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.”
As you may have noticed, I am deliberately not discussing the content of Mr Schiller’s opinions; the point of significance for this column is that yet another employee ran into two problems: (1) forgetting that he was on the job; and (2) assuming confidentiality where none exists. I’ll start with the first issue today and in the next column and then move on to the issue of confidentiality.
The first principle is that everything we say in our official capacity should be viewed as expressing corporate policy. My friend and colleague David Blythe, JD, Associate Professor of Law in the School of Business and Management at Norwich University, explains, “Any communications made within this context should be presumed to be governed by the obligations and responsibilities inherent in the employment relationship – based on and subject to the contractual provisions which define that relationship.” For example, imagine an executive involved in a discussion with, say, potential investors in a corporation’s efforts to raise new capital. Readers will surely agree that having that person voice criticism of his upper management would be unprofessional and potentially actionable as a violation of non-disclosure clauses and reputation-protection provisions (expressed or implied) in his employment contract.
Professor Blythe adds, “Many organizations have explicit policies forbidding employees to wear or display symbols of advocacy such as lapel pins on their clothes or bumper stickers on vehicles used for work. In the mid-1980s, a Killington, Vt., ski area was using secondarily treated effluent from its own facilities (guest rooms, restaurant) for snow-making. A contractor’s employee drove his own car with a bumper sticker reading ‘Killington: Where the Affluent Meet the Effluent’ into the client’s parking lot; the offended client instructed the contractor not to let any of its employees display such stickers on its property. Because such a restriction fell entirely within a contractual relationship to the contractor, Killington was arguably within its rights to make such a demand.”
Similarly, an engineer meeting with customers would be foolish to begin discussing controversial topics off the main subject of a formal meeting intended to discuss design specifications. Talking about religion, politics, sexuality if they are irrelevant to the purpose of the meeting is ill-advised; these topics are effectively taboo subjects when we are on the job representing our organization. Some people cannot partition a speaker’s views into neat categories without overlap; hearing a vendor’s representative espousing repugnant political / religious / sexual views – even if it’s only over lunch – may so alienate listeners that they will (perhaps irrationally) feel distaste for the employer and choose not to do business with it. The problem is even more serious for any organization that depends professionally on a dispassionate attitude towards such subjects: public-opinion or market-research survey firms, academic research institutions, and news organizations are obvious examples of groups that would be adversely affected by off-the-cuff opinions during official functions.
In summary, watch your mouth when you are on duty!
More on this topic next time.
