One of the most persistent criticisms of Enterprise 2.0 is that collaborative tools like wikis and social networks are needless distractions that undermine productivity. Or put simply, they're a time sink.
Scarcely a week goes by without yet another survey telling us that more than half of companies ban Facebook and other social networks
at the office due to concerns about productivity and compliance. In many cases, the same surveys just happen to be commissioned by IT consultants or software vendors who have discovered that scare-mongering is a good way to drum up business.
True, Enterprise 2.0 has been making steady progress -- thanks, it must be said, to the efforts of evangelists who also have a business interest in its adoption. The launch of Facebook-style collaborative software like Saleforce's Chatter
and CubeTree
have given the movement brand appeal. The semantics of the word "chatter" challenge the values of rigid bureaucracies where anything "social" is regarded with suspicion as an invitation to goof off.
And yet there is still pervasive hostility toward "social" interaction in the workplace. The fear factor persists.
It was no different with the advent of the telephone and email. It was argued, in like manner, that they'd undermine productivity by giving employees a social distraction. True enough, many employees even today chatter on their office phones and send frivolous emails to their friends. Just as many senior executives waste valuable company time networking on the golf course and noshing in posh downtown restaurants.
But show me the corporate executive who would give serious consideration to banning the use of office telephones and email in order to boost productivity. The very idea is ludicrous.
Let's face it -- employees and managers alike spend many office hours engaged in "social" activity that cannot readily be quantified according to formal measures of productivity. But if socializing is condoned for top management, why not for employees, too?
This question came sharply into focus recently when I was in Vilnius speaking at a Web 2.0 conference. One of the other speakers was Andy McLoughlin, co-founder of enterprise software company Huddle. Andy told the audience that at Huddle, employees are not only encouraged to socialize at the office, but informal free time has been structured into their work day.
Everyone at Huddle, from the intern to the CEO, gets together for weekly standups on an open floor. No one is excluded; everyone is in the loop. What's more, Huddle employees devote 10 percent of their office hours to "hack time." Or as they put it at Huddle: "Hack time to build cool stuff." At uncool companies, this is probably called goofing off, but at Huddle it's part of the corporate culture -- and it pays off.
Andy listed a number of cool things that were invented during "hack time" -- like Google Maps. The history of great inventions confirms the wisdom of this approach. Many inventions that today we regard as banal aspects of daily life -- from corn flakes and silly putty to Post-it notes and the microwave oven -- were discovered completely by accident.
True, most employees in large-scale companies have not been hired to invent things. But in a corporate environment, both morale and productivity can increase if people are free to interact and discover.
Employees will be more productive if they feel engaged not only in their own work, but also if they feel aligned with the company’s overall strategy. And that will be achieved if the corporate culture is open, transparent, and connected.
Enterprise 2.0 is not just an IT add-on that comes as a packaged software suite. Yes, you need the software. But more importantly, Enterprise 2.0 is also a value system that implies a whole new definition of work.
— Matthew Fraser is a Web 2.0 strategist and an adjunct professor at the American University of Paris.
I think that you need to allow employees to access SN for business purposes such as using Twitter, Facebook etc to deflect expensive calls from your contact centre. For example low spending customers.
Also it should be used for customer care and customer problem resolution purposes and reputation protection. As well as for sales of clearance items or promotions.eg. Airfares, Hotels for example.
Individuals should be able to use SN in their own time in "breakout areas". For example call centres and some corporates have "footbath" PC's that allow personal email and web browsing. I think this is a good way to manage SN in organisations.
As an IT consultant I am fully aware that IT management is struggling with whether social media is productive or obstructive for companies and their employees. Software is being developed and policy and restrictions are being decided everyday by IT managers. The security of the networks of various organizations are at stake but the potential for innovation using social media is a large enough incentive for the discussion of how to properly utilize the medium continues. Palo Alto networks came up with a whitepaper,http://bit.ly/d2NZRp, which will explore the issues surrounding social media in the workplace. It is important to not only understand the immediate benefits of doing business how one lives, but the threat it presents to an organization’s greater ROI and productivity when it comes to the server’s safety and security.If your IT Department wants to block social media apps on the company network…http://bit.ly/d2NZRpandhttp://bit.ly/cR80Al
With the huge growth of smart phones, netbooks, and devices like the iPad, workers can access social networking sites and any others sites they want without the IT department knowing about it. Besides banning the use of such of devices, which would be difficult to implement, there is nothing that companies can do to block cellular transmissions (since it is against the law in the U.S.). Personally I have stop using my work computer to access any personal website since I know many companies have started to use key logging software. I just use my iPhone whenever I need to use the internet for personal use.
Hi timemanagement, that seems to be a good solution to the problem. Yes, a lot of people indeed can be more productive using social networks; the key is to make sure they use it properly. Blocking them can sometimes be counterproductive.
It really depends on the individual person and the workplace, but blocking social networking strikes me as a very crude way to do this. Actually I'm launching software Timedoctor.com which is designed to monitor social networking use, but it doesn't block anything. This means the manager will just get an email at the end of the week which says how much time the person spent on social networking during work hours (and not including time when they are on a break), so this is a much more precise way to monitor things so that social networking does not get out of hand, but it's not the iron fist of just blocking everything. After all if the person wants to do some social networking in their lunch break they definitely should be allowed to do it, and if they need to use social networking sites for their work it's silly to block them.
Huddle is an example of a high-tech organization where innovation can make a difference in the business. Unfortunately, not every business has the same needs.
A call center answering repetitive calls - where money is made talking to customers is not going to see much benefit by social networking. There are millions of retail operation where you want staff ready to assist people, not texting, friending and tweeting.
There are some jobs where social networking can make a difference. There are also other companies and jobs where social networking can cause a loss of productivity.
Companies and HR departments should make decisions that work in their world, their environment and their culture. It's not like allowing social networking is good or bad; nor disallowing it is good or bad. It all depends on the business!
To me it seems the debate (which will never cease) is all about control. Some companies want more control over their employees than others. That's fine, and I understand the reasons. The problem today is that there are too many ways for people to get around these controls and instead of gaining more control, companies are actually losing it.
As an example; Many companies use the arguments that social networking sites are a time sink and a malware threat. So the companies block these sites. Does that mean that people just stop using them and find safer more productive things to do? My guess is no. Today's workers are internet connected all the time. Cut off their access to Facebook and they pull out their iPhone and spend the same amount of time on Facebook there. Now what happens when this iPhone is also used for corporate interactions? You have the same problem, but now you've lost complete control. My view is give them access and have strong policies surrounding it. If someone spends all day on Facebook, there should be consequences. Don't enforce it and it's your own fault that they spend all that time not working.
Out of curiosity; How many people posting here are posting during work hours?
I'm "The IT Guy" where I work. The decision has come down to block Social Networking here. And, you know, I don't particularly agree with it, but I have to admit there *is* an argument for it. In short, "Who does it belong to?"
Not Facebook, Orkut, etc. The time *and* the I.T. resources being expended to access these sites. There's the question. There is a whole culture that orbits around the kinds of activities that SN and other "Web 2.0" services enable. I got a kind of indirect training in that concept when our company made the decision to block all social networking sites (although I talked them into deactivating the blocks during non-business hours and for a time around lunch). Once the block was put in place, 2 of my 70 users complained. More than 30, however, came to me to express relief over other users they'd seen expending a significant portion of the day on SN sites (Facebook being by far the one cited). And that's NOT including the executives who had me initiate the block.
Clearly, an anecdotal example like mine isn't going to resolve the debate. There are too many factors at work. The increasing 'Net awareness of the generation coming into work age, the number of avenues of support that operate through the Internet, the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, the "fuzzing" of the line between work time and personal time, I could probably list 30 or more other factors as well.
However, whether I agree with what I was tasked to do or not, there *is* a clear argument in favor of it, and it's not necessarily a case of (dis)respecting employees or treating them like children. Didn't we have a discussion not too long ago about a police officer in California fired after using a department-issued messaging device for rather sultry purposes? As I recall, a great many of us, myself included, faulted the department for lax enforcement and contradictory permissions by a supervisor. A firewall block as is in place here where I work, that's clarity. And no supervisor can undermine it simply by verbally permitting otherwise.
about a great work-related idea sometimes when you're taking a shower, walking the dog, folding the laundry. Can't bill for that time, now, can you?!
In the same vein, a colleague of mine builds into her client proposals a certain amount of what she calls "staring at the wall" time. She doesn't call it that, of course, but she is able to deliver more creative, substantive work when she knows she is not being nickel-and-dimed for every minute she steps away to eat an apple or dust something.
I like how the company Matt describes thinks. And even though I've blathered on IE before about how I don't like my tax dollars subsidizing a federal employee's Facebook time, I'm starting to think my position is too extreme. When the boss assumes employees will make good choices about how they use their work time, and communicates those expectations clearly, I suppose they are far more apt to. When trust is present on multiple levels throughout the workplace, from colleague to colleague or from superior to subordinate, there is no ceiling to what can be accomplished.
Frankly, I don't see much point in debating whether facebook or twitter is a "time sink" - they simply are! Facebook, as it is now, affects productivity - no doubt about that. But I think the focus should be more about how to make SNs more "productivity-friendly" or even to utilize SN tools to improve productivity. Isn't that the whole concept of Enterprise 2.0 and why we want a special version (an Enterprise Version) of facebook that suits the need of an enterprise? An Enterprise facebook or twitter is different from the normal general-use facebook or twitter and should be customized and manageable to address producitivity issues - just similar to a corporate IT managing standard operating environment (SOE), e.g. an SOE for facebook. Say, if facebook is banned during work hours, why should it be banned during a coffee break or lunch break, etc? Surely a software timer can be used. And what about setting up a "happy-hour" dedicated for SN-ing, so workers could get a chance to tweet or update their status? Things like that can be built-in features of an Enterprise version. We could even go further with SN features that support productivity by enhancing communication in addition to corporate email - like sending out department goals, KPI's, and updated policies, or utilizing SN apps to help with teamwork or project management, mentoring, or just simply keeping intouch... But for a start, one just got to have the mindset that an SN can be productive if it's designed to be!!
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