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Study: People That Think Social Media Helps Their Work Are Probably Wrong

Posted by Soulskill on from the throw-off-the-yoke-of-your-sepia-overlords dept.

RichDiesal writes: "In an upcoming special issue of Social Science Computer Review, researchers set out to understand how people actually use social media while at work and how it affects their job performance. By polling workers across 17 industries, they identified 8 broad ways that people use social media that they believe help their work, and 9 broad ways that people use social media that they believe harm their work. Although the harmful social media behaviors were related to decreased job performance, the beneficial social media behaviors were unrelated to job performance. In short, wasting time on social media hurts you, but trying to use social media to improve your work probably doesn't actually help."

4 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm.. by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Informative

    My first thought here was "well.. duh!"
    Maybe I'm biased not doing a lot of this stuff, but I just can't see any sort of job where social media helps except for jobs that are involved with social media (marketing, customer interactions, etc).

    Next up, will they have the study showing that Slashdot usage is detrimental to work performance?
    (at least I was sure usenet was a net positive because it was often the only place to get to get real answers to tough questions, which really has no replacement today)

    1. Re:Hmm.. by RichDiesal · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The people participating in the study thought these behaviors would help their job performance.... communicating with customers, reaching out to new customers, participating in an online work community, communicating with coworkers, gathering information from colleagues, asking friends/coworkers/family for help solving a work problem, and using social media as a technical solution (e.g. transferring a file from one computer to another). On the surface, it looks like these things would help in many jobs. But from the data, they were unassociated with better work performance.

  2. Really... Facebooking doesn't help productivity!? by the_skywise · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I RTFA but I don't see what they're counting as social media? Are we including things like IM and EMail or collaborative development products like web based agile?
    Or did they just count Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?

  3. doing it wrong by zlives · · Score: 4, Funny

    Thats because they are doing it wrong, what they need is the Oculus Rift VR FB experience.