With the exception of our profession and promoting ourselves and our brand through social media, many workers should not be using social media during work hours. Instead of focusing on their job, many employees are on Facebook via their Blackberrys and Iphones, and costing their company millions of dollars by wasting their time. More than half of U.S. workers waste an hour a day on interruptions like Facebook and Twiiter. Electronic devices and emails take the rap for 60 percent of the disruptions, while phone calls and gossiping with your neighbor takes up the 40% according to a survey on white collar workers in the U.S. done by Harmon.
Another study that was done shows that the average worker wastes 2.5 hours looking for misplaced documents in poorly organized electronic files.
I dont necessarily agree with this opinion of social media being wasteful. Although I’m sure that these employees were mostly using them for social and personal purposes, I think the typical workplace should embrace social media instead of punishing it for its attributes. Why not utilize Twitter to promote your company? Or create a Facebook page to help consumers keep updated on what your company is currently doing. By putting such negative associations with social media, it could easily force the employees to rebel and play on it more.
Also why not embrace the wonderful apps and abilities on smartphones and have a day where employees are shown how to most effectively organize files via Iphone/Blackberry. If employees are poorly organizing their files electronically dont blame the technology, help the employee understand the technology more effectively. After all they’re love spending all of their time on it, don’t they?
Strategically Communicating 
This is an interesting topic to discuss because social media has become such a large part of our everyday lives, both personally and professionally. I have heard of many companies adopting monitor systems that do not allow employees to access certain sites, such as Facebook and Twitter from their work computers. I am not sure how I feel about these kinds of restrictions; however, I see where companies are coming from in that they have the potential to lose a large amount of revenue by employees wasting time on social media. This brings up the question, for me at least, about whether it is legal for companies to block employees from access to certain sites. I suppose if an employee is using a company computer, it should be allowed. However, I am still skeptical about all of this and I agree with you that social media could be used positively in the workplace. It seems it would be highly beneficial to many companies if they were to help employees use social media to promote the company and for organizational purposes.
By: deniseschenasi on May 23, 2011
at 2:50 am