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.
I'd be interested in what they'd say about slashdot use at work and whether they'd rate it as a net gain or loss for the company.
Though I suppose it would depend on how the user used it...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
I would suggest using internal tools like Alfresco, Sharepoint, Jabber, Wiki, whatever to increase social interaction within the company without the need for sites like Facebook.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/08/05/multitasking.focus/
http://www.shmula.com/375/multi-tasking-leads-to-lower-productivity
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
to think that I've been spending my work hours actually working when I could have been goofing off and calling it 'productive social networking' :P Sure, social networking has a place in a productive work environment, but it should be limited in a very tangible way, with the guidelines explained up front, for it not to be abused.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...
...I'm sure they'll reverse all their decisions immediately.
At work email sites, social networking and YouTube are blocked. It smacks of not trusting your employee to do work but there are PR implications if it gets out that employees are slacking.
We also have a download proxy that filters everything for virii (and often stuffs up large downloads since it returns its own download progress page). I can't blame my employer for protecting their assets, especially since a virus outbreak where I work has even worse PR implications, but at the same time I wish there were a better way than this.
The way it is at the moment, some days I don't get time to download anything and don't even think about whether I'm blocked or not, other days it just gets in the way of getting work related content, and on a few rare days where there's little to do it would be nice to have access to these things. This has all been implemented since I joined s few yers ago, and it's certainly not enough to change jobs over on it's own, but it's another thing that has made looking elsewhere in the future a little more palatable. I'm also no longer permitted to play chess on my personal laptop at my desk at lunch time or after work any longer as "it gives the wrong impression", and that really stinks. Telling your employee you don't trust them, and eroding the employee's non-monetary benefits doesn't exactly do wonders for morale...
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
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.
How about the demotivational impact of having authority used against you, stripping away your own?
At a company where I worked, we had to show up for brief (10m) morning meetings, and we had to hand in our weekly reports saying what we accomplished. If you could make leprechauns write your code while you read slashdot, more power to you. If you had to go shopping for tobacco for five minutes before taking a smoking break (whenever you wanted), off you went. Add wii tennis after lunch and beer plus more wii tennis on fridays :)
They adjusted their hiring policy down a little while I worked there, from "add 90%" to "add 75%" or something like that. Yeah, all that long leash really made people not work, that is why they needed more; not because of the profitability of their work.
If people slack off at work rather than at home, who cares as long as their job is done in time? Employ and pay people based on their ability to provide value, not on how hard they must work to do so. Fire the numbskulls, moneyshower the brainiacs.
I'd rather stay away from the networking sites. I need to keep my clearance to keep my job. Make enough noise and they start wondering what else you're up to. This is not negotiable with most similar positions. It's agreed to as a term of employment.
bob@Osprey:~>
sometimes it's very essential to business to control the way in which its employees communicate. If it were my company, I would prohibit company business on any service not explicit in the employee communications manual. (yes, I would write an employee communications manual). Such a manual would lay out a terms of use for using company resources.
Sometimes you have to enact damage control, but it's rarely necessary if your employees know what they can and can't disseminate over services like facebook and twitter.
Lest we forget corporate secrets going out over someone's flickr album. In this new day and age, employees are expected to be productive while communicating readily and instantly with the rest of the social world. There is a way to do it safely. Sometimes you simply must restrict their access if it would damage the company.
They're using their grammar skills there.
... 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.
I get paid salary and part of that is being on call. So the way I see it my downtime can be on call too. If they expect me to wake up and fix a server at 2:00am then they can just suck it up if I read /. while I'm also in the office. If I'm expected to work at home then they should expect some downtime at work. They can't schedule emergencies? I can't schedule the articles I'll be interested in on slashdot.
Luckily I work at place that understands that productivity and "work" aren't the same thing
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
You aren't too bright, are you? There's plenty that can be inferred by the "trivial information" in your FaceBook profile: who your friends are, your political beliefs, your religion, what you did last weekend, etc. Plenty of info to deem whether or not you're a "threat" to whoever has access to that huge amount of data about millions of people.
Thinking you've foiled big brother by not making a facebook profile? You're the one who isn't too bright.
I use my facebook to network. 90% of my "friends" on facebook are past clients, programmers, project managers, executives, creatives, ... I've worked with as a consultant. It helps you to keep track, keep a certain connection and allow you utilize your network inthere, in a slightly more casual way... With other tools it's harder to maintain your network and have more of a feel with your network, and what they're busy with: after a while the image of someone waters down because of the excess of contacts as a consultant, so if you have a face and the conveyed personality you can more easily reconnect with how the person is/was while you worked with them.
It also helps teamspirit in a company: we've created a company group, post our company events, show off to eachother the events we've ended up with with clients and just fool around, have a bit of competitive fun as well. It creates a more tight bound with all our consultants and is just plain fun! Happy, fun developers are productive ones.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1