Just finished another article about the number of companies that ban access to social media sites, (e.g. Facebook, Twitter). According to the article 55%, (
Social media is work worry), of companies block access to these type of sites. It leaves me scratching my head. There are so many negatives to this kind of policy it makes me wonder if I’m missing something really basic.
I certainly understand the company’s concern that social media sites are a potential productivity drain. And I also get that employees who watch lots of YouTube videos are consuming expensive bandwidth at the company’s expense. But aren’t those employee problems: really no different than any other employee productivity problems? If someone can get their job done in 7.5 hours and spends the last 30 minutes of their work day updating their Facebook status, who gets hurt? You might ask yourself if the job is structured correctly when someone can get their job done in less than 8 hours. But that’s a tough question and it means that if I’m the manager, I will have to do a bunch of work to answer that question. So if I just ban access to Facebook from the company then I won’t have to do more managing. In fact I’ll get to do less managing. Hmmm, maybe I just broke the code…..
Nope, I don’t believe that social media is the problem here. I think lazy management is the problem, and there are way too many positives to having employees use social media during their work day to make me believe otherwise. Should you train your employees on the proper way to use social media, (especially is they are representing the company)? Absolutely. Should a company have a social media policy? Certainly. Will it mean more management work? Maybe, (the benefits will outweigh the negatives). But should a company just ban social media across the board? Nope, too easy….