Computerworld reported that according to a recent study, 54% of U.S. companies say that they have banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while working. The study also found that 19% of companies allow social networking use only for business purposes, while 16% allow limited personal use. On top of this, only 10% of the 1,400 CIOs interviewed said that their companies allow employees full access to social networks during work hours.
However, another study, Freedom to surf, found that workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure. Is this break just what many need to recharge themselves and get good ideas at the same time. The study found that people who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t surf.
I guess some companies trust their employees to use good judgment. With the increasing mixing of work time and personal time and the vast amount of work done after “official work hours,” it would makes sense to judge employees on what they accomplish and not whether they look productive or get into the parking lot early.
The report went on to say that the attraction of Web surfing can be attributed to people’s imperfect concentration. “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture – after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored. It’s the same in the work place. Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity.”
While this makes sense, there are many documented business uses of Twitter, for example, as a business intelligence and business development tool. See for example: Here is more form Slate on why employees should be allowed to surf the Web. For more see Using Twitter to Build Your Small Busines and Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations. Darwin is designed to make this web surfing more productive as it helps you filter content by topics and see the correlations between different content sources to discover new relationships between events on the Web (see: Darwin Brings Awareness Engine to Enterprise 2.0).
In part two of this series we will look at the state of Utah that has taken a more progressive approach by providing guidelines on how to use social media like twitter effectively to support their work efforts.
Comments