Advances in communication technology—including instant messaging, professional and social networking sites, and videoconferencing—enable members of organizations to communicate more easily, particularly with clients and colleagues who work offsite or in home offices. But they’ve also introduced new challenges for organizations.

First, there’s the question of figuring out which channel is most appropriate for a particular message in an organizational setting. We discussed this point in earlier chapters—you might, for example, text a friend an apology if you’re too embarrassed to call her. But there are additional ethical and legal considerations when choosing channels in organizations. If you’re a manager, you simply cannot fire someone in an e-mail with the entire department copied. Rather, you would need to have a private face-to-face meeting—or perhaps a phone call if the employee works elsewhere in the country or the world. This is an illustration of media richness, the degree to which a particular channel is communicative (Daft & Lengel, 1984, 1986).

Media richness theory suggests that people must consider the number of contact points a particular channel offers for a message (Montoya, Massey, Hung, & Crisp, 2009). Face-to-face communication is the richest because it allows for verbal and nonverbal contact. Speaking on the phone is slightly less rich because it allows for verbal contact and some limited nonverbal contact (tone of voice, rate of speaking, and so on) but removes the opportunity to communicate with body movements. Text messages are even less rich because they lack most nonverbal cues and need not be responded to immediately. The level of richness people expect in their communication vehicles depends on their goals. So if you need to tell the treasurer of your student organization that your meeting has been moved to a different room, you can just text her. However, if you needed to discuss the fact that you noticed a $250 discrepancy on the books, you’d have better communication with a face-to-face conversation.

Research shows that most people do make conscious decisions about which communication vehicle to use based on the situational and relational contexts. Table 11.2 offers a look at various organizational goals and people’s perceptions about the most competent channel for achieving those goals.

With such a variety of communication technologies available to organizational members to keep in close contact with one another, it should come as no surprise that people wind up using technology to achieve personal goals as well. Twenty years ago, employees might get in trouble if they spent too much time making personal phone calls on the job. So consider how much more distracting it can be to have the ability to bank online, text your romantic partner, and read your brother’s blog during the day. Sixty-nine percent of workers admit that they access the Internet at work for non-work-related purposes, and many of them are quite busy on social networking sites like Facebook (Schweitzer, 2007). Richard Cullen of the Internet filtering company SurfControl, for example, states that Facebook alone may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year due to decreased worker productivity (West, 2007). What’s more is that organizations aren’t just concerned about when you’re updating your status, but also about what you’re posting—particularly whether or not you’re posting comments about the organization or individuals associated with it. Consider, for example, the 2011 case of Natalie Munroe, a high school English teacher who was suspended and faced termination over unflattering comments she made about her students on her personal blog. The blog was relatively anonymous—Munroe never used her full name or identified individual students—and was only followed by nine friends and family members. In addition, the vast majority of posts had nothing to do with the school, the students, or the teaching profession (Werner, 2011). But as with many other high-profile social networking suspensions and terminations, organizations have a keen interest in the way employees represent them in the virtual world.

Concerns over employee Internet use have led many organizations to an increase in workplace surveillance, or monitoring of employees to see how they’re using technology (Ball, 2010; Lucero, Allen, & Elzweig, 2013; Williams, 1993). On some levels, monitoring seems to make sense, particularly when employees are spending time on questionable non-work-related activities. Yet it still raises several important ethical questions: Does monitoring constitute an invasion of employees’ privacy? Should workers accept monitoring as a fact of organizational life? These questions are stimulating important research and lively debates in legal circles, but no one seems to have a clear answer. One thing seems obvious, however: in any organization, you’ll be much more productive if you limit the amount of time you spend using communication technologies for personal matters.

And what happens if work intrudes on your online life—for example, if your supervisor attempts to “friend” you on Facebook? Although we mention this situation in Chapter 7, it bears repeating. In many work situations this might be an unprofessional move on the part of your supervisor, so business professionals would recommend that you ignore this request (Peluchette, Karl, & Fertig, 2013). Most workplace environments understand that their employees prefer to keep their professional and personal lives separate. However, if you feel that you must accept the friend request, you can and should take advantage of your privacy settings to limit what your supervisor can see.