Share what you know with millions of people
Focus is the best place to turn what you know into remarkable content
0
Are you putting any restrictions on Facebook use in the office?
I was curious to see if anyone's office has put restrictions on Facebook. Did you see a rise in productivity? The idea is being tossed around in our board meetings and I think it would be a great idea. Does anyone have any thoughts or experience with the situation? What type of response did you see?
Events
- Dos and Don'ts of Small Business Marketing May 29 @ 11 am PT
- Lead Nurturing 202: The Next Generation May 31 @ 11 am PT
- The Tricks to Paid Media June 6 @ 11 am PT
- Display Advertising for Brand Awareness June 20 @ 11 am PT
5 Answers
The basic rule is yes to work with the corporate social media pages, no to personal hanging around social media pages, games, chatting, adult, etc. Otherwise, early afternoon comes and then, suddenly staff realises that they have hardly done any real work. Many government organisations and ministries have blocked access either to internet or to specific sites. I know of other companies that monitor the browsing history of staff and intervene when they deem that an employee has spent too much time on non business related websites.
However, as social media are becoming more and more entrenched into normal business procedures/tasks, it will be more and more difficult to clearly delineate where business stops and where fooling around starts.
In offices, now it has become standard procedure (particularly in the public sector where the working day starts at 7.30am) in companies and organisations with free access to internet that employees spend more than one hour looking and the news, facebook, twitter, youtube, personal mail, etc. having coffee or chatting with colleagues. Real work does not start before 8.30 at least in offices that do not have direct transactions with clients/visitors.
You have to be careful to not be too authoritarian on issues like this one. A classic "offline" example of this is the company, CEO, or manager that explicitly insists or subtly encourages that employees be in the office for a certain number of hours every day. Most employees react to this type of mandate or encouragement negatively.
So what do you do? First, make sure that all employees have personal objectives that support your corporate objectives. Second, measure achievement against those goals. Third, hold employees accountable for achievement of those goals. You should set goals for employees that map to a full work week, month, or quarter. That way you will know you are getting maximum productivity.
If you do this, you won't have to tell employees to layoff Facebook or the internet in general. They'll be too busy helping you achieve the results you need.
Todd
I think Todd makes a great point in his answer. It definitely seems like a better idea to give employees incentives and objectives to achieve and make sure you hold them accountable. Doing so will make them manage their time at work better without having to stipulate a policy prohibiting social media usage while at work. Creating these types of policies, unfortunately, only seems to hurt employee morale.
I think it would be far better for the company to create a way to get employees to spend less time on those sites without having a specific rule prohibiting it.
A couple years ago, when Myspace was the popular site distracting employees, my old company banned the site from work. Employees not only had a negative reaction to this but they also found other ways around the ban by using backdoor entrances to the site.
Companies can also encourage employees to use social media sites beneficially. As long as employees are not tarnishing the company brand, involvement on these sites can lead to more awareness of the company.
Agreed Leslie, we are a startup and our whole business revolves around social sites so we are making sure our employees are spending at least 1-2 hours a day answering questions about our brand online. They love it and it makes the hours fly by!
~Clint
We are not able to access social media networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, youtube, etc, in the office. However, I'm able to access Linkedin and other sites related to news and information.
This was banned recently due to lots of employees using these sites for amusement and then there is a traffic and slowdown of net.
Answer This Question