Mitigating Modern People Risk With Social Media Screening Benchmarking Data

Workplace misconduct is taking a major toll on employers and regulators are taking notes. Nearly every day, there’s a new leadership scandal, employee incident, or company data leak spreading online. 

As employers look to reduce people risk and costly incidents, it’s easy to take a one-size-fits-all approach. However, misconduct risks vary across roles, seniority, and industry. Mitigating risks across different sectors requires a unique approach. 

Benchmarking misconduct data can help employers understand whether current risk mitigation efforts are working, issues are isolated or patterns, and what next steps can proactively mitigate future risks. It’s time to use modern benchmark data to see exactly what modern workplace risk looks like, tailor screening strategies to the real world, and understand exactly which threats to look out for.

Misconduct in the Workplace: What Does Modern Risk Look Like?

Historically, workplace misconduct occurred and spread in the office. Someone may have been harassed in the breakroom and gossip spread at the watercooler. Misconduct was contained within the office. Today, however, misconduct is frequently shared online. The modern workforce is made up of digital natives who treat social media like their personal diaries. As a result, misconduct incidents have moved outside the office and onto public, visible, and permanent spaces. In fact, more than 50% of employees report either witnessing or experiencing misconduct at work and online misconduct incidents rose 34% in 2025. For employers, this means: 

• Environment: Traditional threats were found in physical office settings and corporate events. Now, they've expanded online to professional networking platforms, public social media, and digital communities.
• Visibility: Traditional workplace threats were internal and largely contained. Today, threats are publicly searchable, permanent, and indexable by search engines and LLMs, making them highly damaging to an organization’s corporate and employer brand.
• Detection: Threats used to be uncovered through criminal background checks and retroactive internal HR complaints. Now, organizations use proactive social media screening to find misconduct indicators before they escalate. 

People Risk Statistics for 2025 Misconduct Trends

Recent findings from The State of Misconduct at Work in 2025 report highlight a rise in digital workplace risk, presenting critical baselines that every HR, talent, and risk leader should know. Using this data, leaders can understand how their business compares to others like theirs.

Most notably:

• In 2025, the overall rate of documented misconduct in the workplace reached 6.45%, representing a 34% increase year-over-year.
• Recent social media screening data reveals that roughly 1 in every 15 candidate screenings now surfaces adverse online behavior that directly violates standard corporate policies.
• While the industry held a misconduct rate of 11.84%, adverse reports within Financial Services averaged 18 flags per report, more than any other industry included in the analysis. 
• Workplace behavior risks are actively moving away from traditional, conflict-heavy public platforms and shifting directly into mainstream and professional networks. LinkedIn experienced a 200% increase in misconduct signals, while Facebook recorded a 100% increase.
• Harassment and trolling represent the largest overall share of flagged digital misconduct behaviors at 37.2%. This is followed by 23.9% of flags for intolerance, and 17.8% of flags for sexually explicit misconduct. 

This data paints a clear picture of what social media misconduct is today: it’s highly visible, and on the platforms where companies build their corporate and employer brands.

5 Ways to Use Benchmark Data to Mitigate Misconduct

Understanding misconduct at work is only the first step. To safeguard employees and businesses from modern people risk, employers need to leverage benchmarking data as part of their proactive risk management framework. Here’s how to improve screening practices and boost retention:

1. Audit Your Corporate Code of Conduct

Many employee handbooks haven’t been updated to account for the behavior of digital natives. Globally, users are spending nearly 3 hours a day on social media apps, according to 2026 data from SproutSocial. In many cases, a company will have a  policy prohibiting harassment or intolerance, but they don’t screen for these behaviors online where they are most likely to appear. This creates a  gap in what businesses are screening for versus what behaviors are actually occurring. 

It’s time for organizations to audit their Codes of Conduct and screening criteria. Ensuring modern risks such as online intolerance, trolling, and text- or image-based harassment are defined in the Employee Handbook and mirrored in the company's social media screening criteria.

Using a tool like Fama’s Onboarding Wizard can help automate this process to ensure that screening criteria is aligned with company policy.

2. Define Job-Relevant Risk in Your Vertical

A major mistake in risk management is applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Workplace risk varies dramatically depending on the role, access level, and industry. By looking at benchmarking data, leadership can tailor screening criteria to catch the threats most common in organizations like yours:

• Financial Services: High-volume density risks mean screening must focus heavily on misconduct signals in Finance, such as insider threats, fraud indicators, and non-compliant communication channels.
  
  Likewise, as of 1 September 2026, UK regulators are cracking down on non-financial misconduct like harassment, threats of violence, and illegal activity, making proactive screening important.
• Healthcare: Risk mitigation must prioritize patient safety, emotional stability, and protecting strict patient privacy (HIPAA compliance) from information and data leaks.
• Education: Screening must heavily focus on the protection of students and the academic institution as a whole from threats of fraud, explicit content, or targeted harassment.
• Technology & CTO Frameworks: For technical leadership, the focus shifts to protecting intellectual property, preventing data leaks, and identifying insider threats before an individual is granted access to the core tech stack.
• Public Sector: In the public sector, the cost of a bad hire is devastating community trust, whether the misconduct is harassment or intolerant.

3. Modernize the Entire Employee Lifecycle

People risk changes over time. Even an employee  who clears a traditional background check may develop high-risk behaviors months or years into their tenure.

By implementing periodic employee rescreening, companies can surface risks as they emerge throughout the employee lifecycle. This information can be used to both intervene before issues escalate as well as identify larger workforce issues to address. For instance, if an internal pulse check shows a spike in online harassment or intolerance, HR teams can determine where targeted training or additional employee support programs may be needed.

4. Anonymize and Aggregate Data for Review

Manually screening a candidate’s public online presence opens the door for discrimination lawsuits and similar legal liabilities. Viewing a candidate’s race, religion, gender, or age during a review can lead to unconscious bias and EEOC violations. Moving away from manual or Chatgpt’ed social media reviews and toward automated, high-level data dashboards eliminates this compliance liability entirely.

With automated screening technology, organizations can safely review online behavior risk signals both at the candidate level and in aggregate. Looking at overall misconduct metrics allows risk managers to understand broader people risks while tracking baseline trends among their candidates or employees.

Additionally, viewing aggregated data shows businesses exactly how an individual candidate compares to other applicants screened. Instead of evaluating an online footprint in a vacuum, talent teams get a clear comparison. This provides helpful context during adjudication processes, making it easy to see if a candidate has significantly more high-risk behaviors than others screened. This aggregate approach keeps the focus entirely on objective, job-relevant behaviors without exposing the company to compliance violations and risk.

5. Leverage Benchmarking as an Early Warning System

When inappropriate workplace behavior surfaces online, leadership is often left wondering if it’s an isolated mistake or a systemic pattern. This is where high-level benchmarking data can act  as an early warning system.

Staying on top of industry benchmarks gives risk teams a clear view of their business, workforce, and vertical. Instead of looking at data as a static, one-time report, companies should treat benchmarks as an ongoing pulse check to measure the reality of their work environment against the rest of their industry.

For example, the average Financial Services institution sees 18 red flags on a screening report. If a firm is consistently seeing double that number, the data signals there may be a deeper behavior issue or a policy enforcement issue.  This data may signal it’s time to update internal policies, roll out targeted employee training, or reinforce how corporate standards are being communicated.

On the other hand, having these benchmarks helps risk teams keep things in perspective. It allows them to spot the difference between a person who’s just exhibiting normal, online behavior and a candidate who is a genuine outlier and a true threat to workplace safety.

Using Misconduct Data to Support a Safe Work Environment

Now that misconduct has moved online, social media screening is helping employers safeguard their workplaces and people. The insights gathered from these screenings are treated as proactive,  data-backed insights to build and maintain a genuinely safe, respectful, and inclusive work environment.

Relying solely on outdated, reactive screening methods means an organization is essentially waiting for a crisis to happen. By the time a high-risk behavior pattern escalates into an HR investigation, a legal claim, or a public relations nightmare, the damage to employee morale, well-being, safety, and corporate reputation is already done.

The 2025 benchmark data provides a clear picture of high-risk behaviors that are impacting organizations in your industry and workforce. It acts as a diagnostic tool for HR teams and risk managers to roadmap where workplace risk is actively heading.

Once leadership understands what modern misconduct at work looks like, the next step is to act on it. Data-driven organizations don't use social media screening to automatically exclude or terminate individuals. Instead, they use these insights to understand where someone may need additional support and address issues as they emerge.

Mitigating modern people risk requires modern tools. By replacing guesswork with data and manual reviews with compliant screening technology from Fama, employers can confidently build a workplace rooted in safety, compliance, and mutual respect.

Ready to see how your organization’s risk profile matches up against the latest benchmarks? Book a demo with Fama today and discover how modern social media screening can protect your people and your brand.