The Situation:
A coworker wants to be friends on Facebook. You don’t want to snub her by not accepting, but you don’t know if you want this person seeing what your close friends and family see. What would you do?

The Response:
For Chester Warzynski, executive director of the Office of Organizational Development, he’d accept, but with a caveat.  

“I would limit what the person could see on my page,” Warzynski said. 

Kara Tillman would do the same by taking advantage of the list feature and privacy settings to categorize friends into different groups. 

“Of course, nothing is really private once you’ve shared it online with your friends, but this can provide a certain level of control when there is a concern about mixing your personal and professional lives online,” said Tillman, who is director of change management in the Office of Human Resources.

Karen Veasey, faculty support coordinator for chemical and biomolecular engineering, would politely decline the request. 

“I would tell the person not to take it personally,” Veasey said. “I try to keep the Facebook thing simple and only correspond with family and a few close friends who live out of state.” 

David Santa Ana, associate director of parking, would also let the coworker know that he prefers to keep work relationships out of the social media environment. If something needed to be shared, an email or phone call would be Santa Ana’s preference, he added.  

“I don’t use Facebook for personal stuff — for that I use Google+,” said David Terraso, director of communications for the College of Sciences. “I’d be friends with the person on Facebook, but I don’t really post anything there. I just have the account for work.”