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Social Networking: The New Workplace Smoke Break
snydeq writes "J. Peter Bruzzese sees a solution for organizations seeking to cut down employee time spent on social networks at work: treat social networking like a smoke break. 'Try as you might to keep social networks at bay, mobile devices let people be in constant connection to their social networking vices over the cellular networks, which you can't block. Still, it's not completely impossible to stop social time-wasting over mobile: You can establish policies that, if enforced strongly enough, eliminate social networks from being accessed on company time. Treat it like smoking: Let employees take a 15-minute coffee/smoking/Facebook break and make them go to a designated area to do it.'"
first post!
So - the smokers get double breaks?
Since, they will be smoking while using the social media - that's multi-tasking. Like, 30 minutes worth of break time in 15 minutes.
Not fair to those with untainted lungs!
Yes, heaven forbid your employees take 10 minutes off from their monotonous cubicle hellholes to communicate a little with friends and family. It's not like studies have shown that more worker breaks increase productivity or anything. Henry Ford actually told his workers to work less because they got more done.
Management doesn't know shit. Taking short breaks isn't slacking off, and studies have shown that such breaks improve worker productivity.
Management's problem is that it sees everything through a veil of pie charts and graphs, and if someone spends five minutes looking at pictures of their kids on Facebook, it must mean 0.2058% less revenue. Gotta fret over those graphs and spreadsheets.
Also, yeeeaah, can you come in on Sunday, too? We lost some people and need to catch up. Thaaaanks.
Furthermore, where is the line drawn? Should we fire the guy who takes too many bathroom breaks? How about the woman who walks around to stretch her legs?
Instead of worrying about what employees are doing with their time at work, the focus should be on how much work employees get done. Who's the better employee, the guy who works 9 to 5 or the guy who works 8 to 6? What if the guy who works 9 to 5 doesn't take a break but the guy who works 8-6 spends 4 hours playing games online? And on top of that, what if 9-5 guy finishes one project a day while 8-6 finishes 3? The guy who meets his deadlines and accomplishes things is the guy you want, regardless of whether he's taking smoke breaks, playing games, or spending time on social media sites (assuming he isn't distracting other workers, a health risk, etc., etc.).
to look for an employer that isn't stuck trying to fit modern workplace paradigms into a tiny little box of thirty-year-old management strategies.
"We don't really get this social media thing, but we DO understand smoke breaks. Just send the geeks outside with the rest! Problem solved."
It's a pretty well known fact nowadays that the human brain is not a machine, and as such, needs a break every so often.
Since small breaks are actually needed to keep the brain fresh and doing good work what do you get forbidding these things? Answer: nothing good. People will find something else to do on the breaks even if it's talking to coworkers besides the coffee machine. Besides, they will be more resented, angry and productivity will probably be lower than if they were happy.
Of course, one thing is taking small breaks and another one is checking facebook every 5 minutes. In that case you're probably getting no work done. In the end is the same as restricting the Internet: A middle ground is probably the best choice. It also helps to communicate clearly the company policies regarding these things.
I work for a company that blocks social media, as well as "blogs" and "newsgroups" broadly categorised. Effectively the top 2-3 google results I get when searching for things like puppet recipes, or common faults are blocked. This company does NOT get social media. They asked us recently for comments regarding this policy, and I'll paraphrase mine here: Slacking off is slacking off. If people are disengaged, you don't make them more engaged by banning whatever they are doing to fill in the hours they are spending at their desk. OTOH if people are engaged, social media use might augment, rather than threaten productivity. It's interesting the number of people whose fear of social media is that it will make OTHER PEOPLE less productive. Not them of course, but "those damn kids".
Now we can start treating all the 'Social Networkers' as Pariahs just like we do with Smokers.
Send them outside into the rain and snow if they want to be sociable...
What about the slack executive that is incompetent at his job and got promoted by being a skilled psychopath. They can't do their job properly so they will take the easiest measures and that includes just firing 15% of the workforce at random to keep the rest on toes. Instil fear in the workers as the psychopath strolls around deciding who at random they will fire and what lies they will make up for the firing.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If you have competent management they cn tell who gets work done. Unless you work in a factory where you have shift breaks you can tell who isn't pulling their weight. It doesn't matter the reason. If someone can do the work while reading slashdot a few times a day who cares?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Actually, short breaks _don't_ improve productivity. Latest study (Harvard Business Review - http://hbr.org/2012/05/coffee-breaks-dont-boost-productivity-after-all/ar/1 - _do_ sign up and read the whole article, don't just read the headline) shows that productivity is, at best, indifferent to micro breaks and at worst, reduced significantly. Those breaks _do_ have some effect on the stress level of the employee, but that's not of the employer _immediate_ concern (though long-term employers should factor this into their calculations). Numbers and cases, or it isn't science. (oh, and 5 minutes of an 8 hours day is ~1%, not 0.2%).
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout [Robert Heinlein]
Plus tens to hundreds of other throwaway dummy accounts.
... says mr. "Anonymous Coward".
I've seen you use tens of thousands of throwaway dummy accounts and usually you're just trolling or flamebating.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They are saying "Let employees take a 15-minute coffee/smoking/Facebook break." That isn't even in the article, that is on the damn Slashdot post. I think it is reasonable to RTFP at least.
The reason employers worry about unrestricted Facebook access is because some employees will slack hard with it. I've seen it at work, and have friends who have seen it: People who will spend hours a day messing around on Facebook not doing anything useful.
This is a proposal saying "Don't ban it, workers need a break. Let them take a break and use it a reasonable amount."
The core problem, of course, is that many workplaces (particularly offices) have no adequate way to measure employee productivity and thus use "time spent staring at your desk at a VDU" or similar as a surrogate indicator of performance.
The most productive people I know are the ones who regularly take short breaks. Even when we're in the middle of a crisis, our bosses will insist on us taking short breaks, and as an ex-smoker I still take fag breaks - you'd be amazed how many eureka* moments you can get whilst standing outside the office looking at a flower bed or waiting in line for a coffee wondering what the difference between two roasts is.
Just like too much coffee can ruin your concentration, staying on the same problem for too long frequently makes you blind to the actual solution.
* itself, of course, a term coined when the frustrated Archimedes took a break from trying to solve his problem.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
That's always been a problem historically, at least in the tech/computer industry, and I suspect others as well.
The PHB's have no metrics to evaluate the people and technologies that they control but do not understand. So, they use the only yardstick they have at their disposal - judging people by their employee skills; i.e. showing up to work on time, not taking excessive breaks, etc.
Kind of sucks, but it's been that way as long as I can remember, probably longer (and I'm 50...).
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I'm concerned about second hand Facebook.