Social Media: Positive Impact or Workplace Productivity Killer?
I’ve been following a thread for a couple of years from Shel Holtz, a communications consultant and social media guru. One of the principle lessons in any of Shel’s workshops has to do with the availability of tools for employees and empowerment of associates to share information and generally increase corporate memory.
Shel’s continuation of the “blocking” conversation is housed on the site www.stopblocking.org - designed to draw awareness to the need for organizations and corporations to stop blocking tools that employees use to do business. The principle argument for blocking social media tools is the perception that employees will take advantage of their access.
In my opinion, if we spent more time managing/hiring good people, we’d empower associates to do their jobs better, feel more trusted and be able to do great things through social media - like watch podcasts to increase workplace knowledge. I know we have a long way to go, but I hope we’re closer to decision makers understanding the value in utilizing these types of tools to address the workforce issues and solve new communications issues created by globalization, conflicting schedules and a shrinking workforce. Sure, there will be abuse - but there’s abuse with telephones, break time and water-cooler talk.
Check out www.stopblocking.org for more information.
So as professionals of varied industries and occupations - what’s your opinion? To block or not to block?
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Tags: Blogs, IT, social media at work
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Like I wrote...
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:26 pm
depends on the social media mechanism/medium you’re talking about. facebook sucks me in and kills my productivity unless i signed in specifically to contact someone through it. however, twitter allows me to interact in brief bursts without breaking workflow. same with gTalk.
if you block, you’re going to have people spend time trying to find work-arounds and/or communicating however they can/spending time trying to figure out how as opposed to communicating fluidly while progressing in tasks.
it comes down to hiring people who have high bandwidth, can multi-task and who you can just downright trust.
September 6th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Nice blog; found you tonight by clicking on a link from Punk Rock HR blog. I see some great articles here that I want to read up on.
Re: social media in the workplace. I work at a media company and nothing is blocked on my Internet access; in my case my boss even asked me what I thought of Twitter; I’d never heard of it before, so he encouraged me to sign up and give him some feedback. Same goes for LinkedIn too. I quickly racked up over one hundred good business contacts over there and have had many directly work-related communications through that site. It is one of the best. But I also really like Twitter; I think every business should be learning how to use it to take advantage of promoting; it’s really an awesome marketing tool!
I also have a Facebook account but I don’t use that one as often while I’m at work. I could and sometimes I do, but like the other poster here mentioned, I would find that one to be more of a valuable time-waster.
I certainly consider myself to be extremely fortunate in that the organization I work for must trust me completely; I even get to work from home a few times a week! Now that’s trusting! I find that telecommuting allows me to save a great deal of time and is also very productive but on the flip side I would not want to do it exclusively all the time; some face-to-face interaction and communication remains and should be a vital and important part of doing business.
Love all the new social media stuff though; and I’ve recently found several contacts I have been looking for for many years. Lots of great possibilities abound for the social media aspect from a business standpoint. I might even start up my own blog and write about all endless possibilities in using Twitter. I had a problem with my printer one day while working from home, I posted a message on how frustrated I was, I got a reply back literally within minutes with some suggestions on how to fix my problem!
September 13th, 2008 at 8:44 am
The social web is the best way in moment for be involved
in the more higth pic of the progress.Viva the social web,anyone.
September 17th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I wrote a post about this not too long ago and definitely got some people all fired up. I work in the Public Relations industry and I definitely say no to blocking.