Curious Case of the Infosys Employee and a Viral Coronavirus Facebook Post

Individuals, businesses and the government, this Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown is not easy for anyone. While individuals are responsible for taking care of their family whilst working from home, organizations have to take care of hundreds of such families while also being responsible for their actions. In the case of Infosys, the action of one Infosys employee has embarrassed the entire organization, which was already under fire for not being adequately prepared to allow employees to work from home.

Just when Infosys was grappling with the lockdown along with ensuring business continuity amidst advisories from the local governments of 46 countries the company operates in pouring in, an Infosys employee posted a highly inappropriate message on Facebook that quickly went viral. “Let’s join hands, go out and sneeze with open mouth in public. Spread the virus,” said the post by Mujeeb Mohammad, former Senior Technology Architect at Infosys.

Thousands of screenshots of the post made their way to social media platforms questioning Infosys on the irresponsible and objectionable action of the employee. Several Twitteratis tagged Infosys and questioned the organization if they endorsed the views of the employee. Infosys, however, expeditiously took stock of the situation and acknowledged the fact that “someone claiming to be an Infosys employee” had posted “inappropriate content”, and that they were investigating the matter internally.

Soon after that, screenshots of the LinkedIn page of the employee saying he was a Senior Technology Architect at Infosys spread like wildfire after which his Facebook and LinkedIn pages were taken down. This led to a larger number of people asking the organization as to why they were taking so much time to act on this individual’s grave mistake when such misfortune had fallen upon the entire world.

Infosys then said that although they were deeply concerned with the inappropriate post being attributed to the Infosys employee, their preliminary investigation on the employee had suggested that this could be a case of “mistaken identity”. Nevertheless, the company said they would still continue to investigate the matter and also assist with any independent investigation. The company also promised appropriate action.

Netizens, still not satisfied with the explanation given by Infosys, then started to circulate a screenshot of the company’s internal employee portal showing all the personal details of the Infosys employee such as employee code, phone number and also the name of the manager he reported to. Apart from that, news that the person in question was soon going to be arrested started to do the rounds.

Finally, Infosys then tweeted saying that they had completed their investigation and they had found the social media post by the Infosys employee to be against Infosys’ code of conduct and its commitment to responsible social sharing. The company also added it was not a case of mistaken identity that they initially suspected it to be and terminated the services of the employee.

Although Mujeeb Mohammad has now been arrested by the Central Crime Branch under the non-bailable Section 505 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), this peculiar incident does raise a lot of questions. Why did the individual feel the need to post something as repugnant when the world is already in a vulnerable situation? While it is understandable that a company’s internal investigation does take time and a knee jerk reaction could be foolish, must they act faster under such circumstances at least? Are there any practices that the human resource industry can adopt to avoid hiring employees with a disturbed mindset? Should the use of artificial intelligence tools to identify people based on the history of their social media posts be made mandatory so that hiring troublesome individuals can be avoided?

However, in this regard, it is fair to state that nobody could have anticipated these circumstances as each and every organization is facing such an unprecedented state of affairs presumably for the first time since their inception. That said, while this incident was embarrassing to say the least for Infosys, it may be a lesson for the rest.