Misconduct Across the Employee Lifecycle: Navigating Screening and Rescreening to Protect Your People and Profits
You've invested heavily in creating a positive company culture, a strong brand, and robust security. But are you truly protected from the misconduct that might remain hidden until it’s too late?
Thanks to the increasing prevalence of social media platforms, the gap between our online and in-person lives is closing, making online behavior a powerful predictor of how a candidate or an employee might behave in the real world.
A social media post can hint at underlying issues that could escalate into gross misconduct, jeopardizing the safety and well-being of your employees. To prioritize both workplace safety and employee well-being, it’s important that teams are surrounded by people with integrity, rather than those with known histories of misconduct or toxic behavior.
Employees continuously learn and adapt their behaviors based on what they see as acceptable within the workplace. As a result, the potential for risk evolves with your employees throughout their entire career. Now, one-time background checks during the pre-employment process are no longer enough to prevent risks from walking through the door. Instead, it’s time for a continuous, intelligent approach to employee risk management that can keep up throughout the changing demands of the employee lifecycle.
What is the Employee Lifecycle?
The employee lifecycle is more than just a hiring timeline. It's a framework encompassing every stage of an individual's journey with your organization, from initial attraction as a candidate to their eventual departure. Think of it as a loop of engagement, development, and evolution. The employee lifecycle typically includes:
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Development
- Retention
- Separation
Each stage presents unique opportunities and, critically, unique risks.
During those initial stages, the focus is naturally on pre-employment background checks to gain an understanding of skills, cultural fit, and crucially, any indicators of misconduct. This ensures a secure and productive start once a candidate transitions into the onboarding phase.
However, this initial screening is merely a snapshot. People are not static. Their behaviors, attitudes, and external influences can, and often do, change over time. The person hired, thoroughly vetted and seemingly exemplary, may evolve in ways that introduce new forms of misconduct at work, from subtle shifts in online conduct to more overt workplace misconduct.
This reality underscores why a robust approach to employee screening must extend beyond the candidate journey, embracing ongoing employee rescreening to protect your people throughout the entire employee lifecycle.
The Progression of Workplace Misconduct Throughout the Employee Lifecycle
Although misconduct isn’t always present during the pre-hire stage of the employee lifecycle, it’s also not something that occurs instantaneously. Instead, it often unfolds along a continuum, influenced by a blend of individual behavioral shifts, organizational culture, and leadership's responsiveness. What might begin as passive exposure to problematic content can escalate to active participation in egregious acts.
Research indicates a concerning pathway: an individual may first experience exposure to harmful or extreme online content. With repeated exposure, this content can become normalized, leading to acceptance. From there, that person might transition to advocacy, actively sharing or endorsing harmful content. The final, alarming stage is participation, where these views translate into real-world actions, whether online or within the workplace. This whole process can be completed in a matter of weeks as a result of the hyper-connectivity of the digital age and our deeply human desire to fit-in. With that in mind, screening throughout the employee lifecycle has become a clear necessity for addressing employee risk.
Candidate Screening: Recruitment & Hiring
During the initial phases of the employee lifecycle, misconduct often manifests as a candidate attempting to conceal misconduct past behaviors or misrepresent their professional history. This is where comprehensive social media screening can prevent possible misconduct from occurring down the line.
The goal is to identify early warning signs, from general misconduct like dishonesty on a resume to potential indicators of gross misconduct that may emerge later, such as public posts promoting hate speech, extremist content, or violence. At this stage, you're looking for existing patterns of behavior that could indicate future risk.
Social Media Background Checks: Onboarding
The onboarding phase is a critical window where new hires absorb company culture and expectations. Misconduct here might be subtle: a casual disregard for company policies, minor breaches of confidentiality, or an early display of disrespect for colleagues. These instances, though often categorized as general misconduct, are crucial indicators.
Employee Screening: Retention
In the retention phase, tenured employees, while often valuable assets, can also pose unique challenges if issues go unaddressed. A sense of intense stress, burnout, desire to fit in, or pressure to meet seemingly impossible goals can drive employees toward severe acts. Gross misconduct, such as fraud, data theft, or threats of violence, might emerge from long-simmering issues or significant life changes.
Company culture and proactive leadership are essential here, fostering an environment where employees feel heard and supported, and where concerns are addressed before they escalate into high-impact risks. This is especially critical given that 26% of workplace violence incidents are committed by employees themselves.
Employee Screening: Development & Performance Management
As employees move into the development and performance management stages, the nature of potential workplace misconduct can evolve. Familiarity with systems, access to sensitive information, and developing relationships can create new avenues for risk. Misconduct might range from misuse of company resources to more serious concerns like workplace violence, harassment, or even the emergence of insider threats.
Offboarding: Separation
Finally, the separation phase, whether voluntary or involuntary, can also present risks. Disgruntled departing employees might engage in violent retaliatory actions, intellectual property theft, or damage to reputation. In fact, 3% of workplace violence incidents are committed by former employees, underscoring the importance of monitoring this stage closely. In some cases, the separation process can lead to employees acting out in an extreme manner, such as when a driver was found to be stealing from his company and later opened fire in his former business. During this stage, online screening may uncover sentiment toward the business that could indicate intent to engage in gross misconduct.
It's during these post-hire phases that ongoing employee rescreening becomes vital, as initial screenings aren't always able to predict gross behaviors that emerge later on. As people change, so can their risk profile, requiring periodic employee rescreening to detect emerging patterns that might not be visible if people aren’t specifically looking for them.
3 Ways Employee Screening and Rescreening Mitigates Workplace Misconduct
Both candidate screening and employee rescreening are proactive, strategic tools that fundamentally strengthen an organization's defenses against workplace misconduct throughout the entire employee lifecycle. By providing ongoing insight into potential risks, this technology empowers businesses to actively mitigate the damage that misconduct can inflict on their most valuable assets: their people, their public perception, and their legal standing.
1. Preserves Company Culture
A strong, positive company culture fosters trust, collaboration, and a sense of belonging. However, even a single instance of misconduct can harm this foundation. More concerning, workplace misconduct can be contagious if employees see problematic behaviors that go without consequences. This sends a dangerous signal that these behaviors are tolerated, leading to decreased morale, higher turnover, and a fractured work environment.
Employee screening acts as an early warning system, allowing you to prevent misconduct and maintain a strong company culture. It helps you identify the most extreme and dangerous risks that might otherwise go unnoticed, such as manifestos, falsifying records, intentions to act violently, or theft. By identifying concerning online behaviors that might signal a likelihood for workplace misconduct, organizations can intervene proactively.
This allows HR and leadership to address issues before they grow into a tragedy, reinforce expected conduct, and demonstrate an unwavering commitment to a respectful and inclusive environment. It shows employees that their well-being is a priority and that everyone is held to the same high standards, ultimately preserving the integrity and health of your company culture.
2. Maintains Brand Image
With so many people actively engaging online on a day-to-day basis, a single problematic social media post by an employee can instantly go viral, transforming an incident into a crisis. This direct link between individual employee conduct and corporate reputation has never been stronger. A company's brand image, carefully cultivated over years, can be severely damaged by a single incident of employee misconduct that goes public, leading to loss of customer trust, investor confidence, and difficulty in attracting top talent.
By proactively scanning for misconduct through social media screening, organizations gain the critical foresight needed to protect their brand. Whether it's identifying a candidate with a history of threatening online behavior or detecting emerging risks among current employees, this proactive approach allows businesses to address issues swiftly. And in turn, this prevents a single incident from causing catastrophic reputational damage and becoming headline news.
3. Prevents Legal Repercussions
The legal landscape surrounding workplace misconduct is complex, with significant financial and operational consequences for employers who fail to maintain a safe and compliant environment. Recent legal precedents, such as the Okonowsky v. Merrick Garland case, have reinforced that employers can be held liable for employee misconduct, even when it originates on social media.
By implementing robust employee screening programs, businesses are actively fulfilling their due diligence. This proactive stance enables them to identify and address emerging risks related to harassment, discrimination, illegal activities, insider threats, or violent behavior before they escalate into formal complaints, lawsuits, or regulatory penalties. This foresight not only mitigates the risk of costly litigation, fines, and settlements but also demonstrates a commitment to upholding legal and ethical standards, protecting both your business and your people.
Ensure Workplace Safety with Social Media Screening Solutions
Your workplace is built on trust, transparency, and accountability. But that trust can only thrive when risk is actively managed. While traditional background checks provide a foundational view, they can’t capture the dynamic nature of human behavior or the rapidly evolving spectrum of online conduct across the employee lifecycle. For any business serious about safeguarding its people, reputation, and legal standing, candidate and employee screening are essential.
Fama's advanced technology offers the comprehensive and compliant insights necessary to navigate these complexities. Our solution doesn't just help you identify the right candidates at the pre-hire stage, filtering for signs of misconduct like insider threats, violence, or illegal activity that might be missed by conventional methods. It goes further, empowering you to sustain a positive work environment throughout the entire employee lifecycle.
By leveraging AI-driven analysis, Fama Pulse meticulously scans publicly available online content for behavioral indicators. Through this process, leadership and HR teams are provided with job-relevant behavioral insights that traditional or one-time background checks can’t uncover. This means you can:
- Protect psychological well-being and boost productivity by creating a safe environment
- Prevent workplace violence and other crises before they start
- Mitigate brand and legal risks by addressing misconduct early
With Fama, employee risk management is no longer reactive. Social media screening for both candidates and employees ensures that the people who join your team are not just talented, but remain essential, positive assets, contributing to a secure, thriving, and resilient organization. Book a demo today to discover how Fama's social media screening solutions can protect your most valuable investments: your people and your peace of mind.
