AT WORK, A VIRTUAL PLOT

When your life—personal and professional—is uploaded on the Net, can you keep office nastiness out of your scrapbook?
When nina mehta, a 26-year-old corporate sales manager, logged onto her Facebook account during a break in office, the news feed—the continually updated ticker of the minutiae of virtual life—was like a smack on her face. “Asheem Bose wrote on Tina Khanna’s wall: Doesn’t Nina Mehta look like she’s swallowed a raw snake?” The second line on the feed said, “Tina Khanna wrote on Asheem Bose’s wall: Yeah, she does”. The third said, “Asheem Bose wrote on Tina Khanna’s wall: The poor snake had to go through her.”

This could not have been a joke, not even a bad one. For, Bose was no college chum and Tina was not a pal. Bose was Nina’s boss and Tina was her colleague, a member of the sales team at an insurance firm. They were professionals who had had no or limited casual conversations at work, though Nina had sensed that things were souring with the boss. Before she knew it, the hostility had been uploaded on to the Net.

Where’s the Netiquette?
The hardsell about social networking sites has been infinite connection and boundless goodwill, a smaller world, a friendlier world. But look inside the microcosm of your office and the answers get a little complicated. What if a boss you are not pally with sends a friend request to you? Can you afford to spurn him? A study carried out in the UK by LinkedIn, a professional networking site, found that a third of workers admit they feel obliged to add a professional contact to their virtual social circle. In the last couple of years, urban Indians who have discovered a life of new connections and virtual friends on social networking sites, are facing similar issues. Which is why Nina could not remove Bose and Tina from her friends’ list despite their behaviour. Which is also why she accepted their friend requests in the first place.

There is even an Internet term to describe the collapsing boundaries between a friend and a colleague. Frolleague—someone you add as your online friend without a thought just because he uses the terminal adjacent to you. “Ignoring friend requests of co-workers, specially bosses, could offend them and may affect your equations with them. On my part though, I only send requests to colleagues who are also friends,” says Sahil Kazmi, 29, a manager at an international NGO, who’s been on Orkut since 2004 and has over 300 friends in his network. At a time when opportunities are plenty and job-hopping a done thing, adding colleagues helps Kazmi keep in touch with them after they’ve left the organisation.

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