News reported on the Wired blog 'Epicenter' warns office workers to check their employment contract or workplace rules before logging into Twitter, Facebook, or any other social networking website.According to Epicenter, a recent study commissioned by Robert Half Technology found that 54% of US companies have banned any use of social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn whilst working on the job. The study, released October 9, also indicated that 19 percent of companies allow social networking only for business purposes, while 16 percent allow limited personal use.
Unsurprisingly, productivity is the core issue raised when it comes to blocking social networking sites. In July, Nucleus Research reported that companies who allowed employees to use social networking sites also had a drop of 1.5 percent in workplace productivity.
"Using social networking sites may divert employees' attention away from more pressing priorities, so it's understandable that some companies limit access," said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a statement.
Nucleus also indicated employees who use social networking sites while working do so up to 2 hours a day. When asked if they are using these sites for business purposes, 87% admitted they weren't, and instead were using social networking for personal reasons.
We didn't ban it until a few people got on it ... 95% of their day. Now they just use their phones and talk all day. It's kind of irritating that some people get to sit around and talk and "be bored" at work (status update they posted while at work) when there's thousands of things they could be doing, yet are so lazy to do. I got on it 30 seconds every 1-3 hours to check it ... now it's banned because of these kids.
Don't bring in interviewees though ... it scares these people into a tizzy!
Keep in mind that they said 54% of US companies.... That doesn't mean 54% of large companies with well managed networks. There are a lot of small offices with no filtering at all.
don't really see the point in 'banning' it, if you can't trust your employees to do their job then i think there is a bigger problem
don't really see the point in 'banning' it, if you can't trust your employees to do their job then i think there is a bigger problem
Yeah I agree. I have a guy at my workplace who was on it 24/7 even after being given a written warning and he's still there.
I block them now.
hehe
Believe it or not that's actually part of my job description.
You can't put people in a 8x8 closed and boring brown square and expect them to perform 40 hours a week without any social interaction with their co-workers.
When you are working it is a professional environment.
Social networking sites and playing games are personal and something that should be done in your time.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet...roductivity.htm
http://www.officearrow.com/software_and_we...1508/p142_dis/3
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet...roductivity.htm
http://www.officearrow.com/software_and_we...1508/p142_dis/3
I can pass on emails from NHS, DWP, Argos and various schools to name a few, where the mofo's that work there put in the wrong information and send it to my email inbox.
I have a unique email address with live and I get all sorts of invites and seriously secret information very personal because the employee's are too busy adding my email address to their social network friends list.
Usually instead of blahblah.s or blahblah.x they send it to blahblah.
I have phond them and they tell me they just made a mistake.
these morongs have sent copious amounts of ts information.
Luckily for them I shred it, of course after complaining to their boss.
From my own experience it is not effective at all.
Blocking some sites like Facebook is not a bad idea. But don't expect this to magically make the people inside your cie motivated.
If a lot of people inside a cie spend many hours a week on forums or social networks it means there's a problem elsewhere inside this cie. Blocking such web sites will not correct this problem.
Also people assume that we pay the standard 40 pounds a month for the internet connection we have but we actually pay 45,000 pounds a year so it is a precious and rather expensive resource that shouldnt be wasted.
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