News outlets often cover workers getting into hot water through misuse of social media, but this week it seems that it was an employer who had the wrong end of the networking stick.
Jim Knight had recently started his job as head chef at The Plough pub in Oxfordshire, but with just a short time to go till Christmas, the pub’s Twitter feed – which Knight had created – was used to post some decidedly less-than-festive messages. At 7pm on Sunday the feed chimed in with “Happy Christmas everyone,” which it proceeded to spoil somewhat by following with: “We’d like to inform you that we’ve just fired our head chef … Unfortunately he wanted to have a weekend off this month and Christmas Day this year for family commitments so we thought we’d sack him. Yeah, a week before Christmas … We don’t care that he has a 7½-month-old baby daughter.”
The feed went on to suggest that the pub was using inferior products in its meals.
Although the messages were soon taken down, the feed had attracted hundreds of followers and the messages were retweeted more than one thousand times. The pub weighed in on the burgeoning crisis, with a spokesperson said that it had no choice but to let the chef go as he wouldn’t work on Christmas day, and that they had made the working days clear at the start of the employment.
The chef’s own feed stated: “Thank you for the kind words. I had no idea this would escalate so quickly. See you in the job centre tomorrow. X.”
However, it seems that he didn’t have to wait too long for another offer – within hours, he tweeted: “Night all. Busy day tomorrow. Thanks again to everyone’s support and kind wishes… I have a new job to start!”
The Shepherd’s Crook pub in Oxfordshire, then tweeted on its account: “now employing chef Jim Knight, of International Twitter fame … Welcome to The Shepherd’s Crook Jim – your misfortune is our very good fortune!!! Enjoy your Xmas Day with your new baby.”
Knight was lucky he didn’t have to wait long for a new job, and his Twitter followers seemed, on the whole, to support him. You would struggle, though, to claim that the episode didn’t run a serious risk of damaging the reputation of either the original employer, or their disgruntled ex-chef.
Ultimately, the most important lesson for any business is to control employees’ access to your communication platforms – or at least make sure you change the password if you sack one of them.