Although a signature on a policy is not a legal requirement for evidencing agreement, it will be acceptable evidence in any tribunal proceedings that an employee has read and understood a policy.
An employment tribunal has ruled that a train driver who posted offensive and discriminatory comments publicly on his personal Twitter account was unfairly dismissed as there was a lack of sufficient evidence that he understood the company policy that he was dismissed for breaching.
The employee had a Twitter account in his own name with a profile picture of himself and mainly tweeted about weightlifting. Around the time of the Brexit referendum his account, which had posted more than 3,700 tweets, became “focused on Brexit and expressions of opinion against immigration”. During this time, he posted racially offensive tweets.
The employee had received various policy documents from his employer on harassment and social media, as well as a fair usage IT document.
However, the applicable policy documents were unsigned by the employee. The further difficulty for the employer in this case was that the employee was dismissed for breaching the Acceptable Use Policy, not for a failure to adhere to the Social Media Policy.
Whilst the employment tribunal found that the dismissal was unfair due to the failure to prove he had been briefed on this policy by the lack of a signed document confirming this, the tribunal found that the employee was entirely to blame for his dismissal and reduced his unfair dismissal award to zero for this reason.
The tribunal found that the employee would have known that posting offensive tweets in a public forum, which he knew was followed by colleagues, could by their nature damage working relationships, particularly in a multi-cultural workforce.
It is critical when dismissing an employee that the correct reason is cited. For further assistance in all things social media, please contact me now.