Employers Check Facebook to Identify Whether ‘Sick’ Workers are Truly Sick

Employers are becoming smart as they attempt to identify workers who may try to bunk work by calling in sick by checking out whether they have accessed social networking sites such as Facebook. Jess Whittaker from Australia's largest social media monitoring service BuzzNumbers said that cheeky employees are more likely than ever to be caught out as companies routinely scan Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for mentions of their brand, the Herald Sun reported.

She said that people should be 100 percent aware that employers are monitoring.

"More often than not, our clients who are monitoring what their consumers are saying on social media are all of a sudden realising there's loads of stuff coming from their employees. We've had scenarios where more than 50 per cent of the discussions that were negative were actually from internal stakeholders," she said.

Whittaker said that social media monitoring regularly turned up examples of employees bragging about doing the wrong thing, such as improperly using company equipment or taking sickies.

"You don't have to plug in every employee's name, but if an employee was to have a keyword of their brand or company somehow attached to their profile, or in their posts or interactions, we could definitely pick that up," she said.

There have been many high profile cases of people being caught out on social media after chucking a sickie.

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Source-ANI