The two most commonly overlooked components of a technology use policy or blogging policy are communications and training. Interestingly, companies rarely involve lawyers in either of these issues, admittedly, sometimes for good reasons. Let me tell you that if you don't address these practical issues, you probably won't get good value for your dollars spent on legal services.

I'll give you these tips for free. You can thank me if you think they are helpful - that will help my feel like I'm doing some good.

In this post, I want to talk about communications. I’ll talk about training tomorrow.

If someone took a close look at the cases involving bloggers and others getting into trouble for violating company policies, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that nearly all of them involved some kind of communications failure. As a practical matter, I suspect that any existing policies and restrictions were not, as a practical matter, effectively communicated to the person who got in trouble. In fairness to some employers, however, the communications breakdown might have happened when a person failed to read a policy or listen to instructions despite an employer's best effort.

An important part of any usage policy is simply getting into a form and format that people can easily read, and will read. This involves factors like readability, headings, bullet points, highlighting the main points, sequencing of categories, organization and even font selection and sizing. Lawyers are not known for excelling at any of these areas. I always like to see clients who want to improve the look and feel of legal documents.

When I speak on this topic, I emphasize that you need to think carefully about who the audience is for your policy and when and under what circumstances they will be reading the policy. The fact is that people will rarely read your policy for the fun of it. They will be reading it either to determine whether a specific activity is or isn’t allowed and commonly when there is a serious problem with potentially serious consequences.

If you have a policy that is 25 pages of single-spaced, dense legalese, people simply will not be able to find the answers that they want. Ideally, you want to make these policies very usable.

I think that you also want to be realistic about whether employees will read these policies. If you stick them up in an obscure place on your intranet or bury them in a stack of other paperwork, they probably will not get read. You also indicate that by your behavior that these policies are not all that important and that they are simply more “paperwork.”

Compare an approach where you take 15 minutes of a meeting to go over the highlights of the policy – the big points – and explain the need for people to follow the policy. Hand them a one page bullet-pointed summary at the end of the meeting. If you also use the meeting to confirm your trust in your employees and your appreciation for the value that they bring to your company, your chances of avoiding technology use problems increase dramatically.

Now, I think that this is all common sense. However, by treating blogging or, more accurately, technology use policies as purely legal issues and simply treating them as necessary legal obligations, you run the risk of neglecting common sense practices, like basic communications, the neglect of which will increase your chances of later legal difficulties.

Have you really communicated what policies you have? Care to see the results of a quiz for your employees about what is in the policies? See the problem?

Next stop: the training component.