Charlotte Church nude shocker

Sometimes a story just looks like a silly bit of entertaining dirt when you see it in the paper - for example in today's Daily Mail there's a piece about a couple of employees in Manchester City Council getting sacked for circulating (bogus) topless pics of singer Charlotte Church. There's a bit of outrage about overreaction, there's reference to the fact that these pictures have been circulating for a while and people are quoted saying the pictures are hardly hardcore porn.

All of which is correct, but there's a lesson in here for the small business owner/manager too, which is that Manchester City Council couldn't afford to be seen as responsible for circulating these images, whether one regards them as funny, offensive or just juvenile. The Council, as a publicly-funded, large institution, will have had acceptable use policies in place to cover just this sort of eventuality. This policy will have been written into contracts with a clear sanction should it be transgressed. But how many small businesses are out there without any such strictures in their contracts? The answer is, probably, a great many. And how many of the owner/managers of these are aware that if an employee starts sending a libellous or sexually explicit e-mail or image from their servers, internally or externally, it's the company rather than the individual that's likely to be held responsible?

There's a lot to be learned from the Charlotte Church incident here (or the "Not Charlotte Church from the Neck Down incident", as nobody seems to be suggesting that the pictures are genuine). It's worth looking long and hard at the action the council took and the speed with which they did it, and to ask whether your own company could react so quickly.