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'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.
... 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 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