Slashdot Mirror
Study Shows Social Networking At Work Is Good
Ostracus writes "Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters, a Demos study suggests.
Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said."
For those of us who have a lot of waiting involved in our jobs, social networks encourage multitasking(and help us enjoy our coffee high) by keeping us busy while the code is compiling or the tests are running.
Before computers, people engaged in "water-cooler" talk, where much of it was social. But often if you want assistance or approval from other sections or departments, you had to make friends with people by "shootin' the breeze". It's not much different in cyberland. They often say business is about who you know, not what you know.
Table-ized A.I.
For me, work comes first. If there is alot of stuff going on, I might not even look at /. all day. Most days there are natural breaks in the day that I use to surf the web. Some days things just run smoothly.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
Two reasons
1. To some people, the benefits of facebook outweigh the risks of the government knowing your favorite movies.
2. Limiting the amount of trivial information availiable is NOT the way to fight big brother. If myspace, facebook, and whatever else were to crumble, as they very well might with the impending dotcom bubble 2.0, that's not going to prevent abuses of privacy. You combat this by voting, by raising awareness, by protesting, letter writing, etc.
To me, it seems kind of like saying "Why would anyone drive on the roads? Your tax money is being used to keep up those roads, and taxes are too high!" Not driving won't lower taxes, and not having a facebook account won't keep you safe from big brother.
At an outfit I used to work for, we had an internal Usenet set up on out intranet. Hey, it was in the last century! We didn't have all this new fangled technology you young punks take for granted.
But, back to the topic at hand. Management took a dim view of the employees chatting back and forth while at work. So they cracked down on it. That drove the on-line conversations to external sites and encouraged anonymity on them. The end result is that the same conversations go on now as before. But enlightened management has a harder time keeping a finger on the pulse of the workforce by lurking on the newsgroups. And more than once, some sensitive information has made it on to the outside systems where the world (competitors, federal regulators, etc.) can see them.
Great move, PHB!
Have gnu, will travel.
... people aren't busy 100% of the time, and attempting to force people to be busy 100% of the time, is more destructive than letting it go.
Wow. Who would have thought?
Seriously, this has been known for quite some time, and any businesses that think they can improve productivity by reducing other options, needs to go back to business school and study leadership and general motivation theory.
Monitoring and punishing people to get them to work harder is industrial revolution style management. We've come a long way since then... baby.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.