News report on The Vancouver Sun has indicated that more companies are banning Social Media sites in the Workplace for employees.
According to Scansafe, one of the Internet’s biggest security providers, Companies around the world are increasingly choking off their employees’ access to social-networking websites, such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There has been 20% increase in the last 6 months in the number of companies doing this.
Why Companies BAN?
1. Data security : Employees can mistakenly leak confidential info in these sites harming the interest of the employer.
2. Internet Security : Companies fear of Viruses and Malwares taking control of employees’ computer, and fear Social Networking Sites as one of the major source.
3. Decay in Productivity : Companies believe employees waste time in Social Networking Sites, and thus have low productivity at work.
4. Congestion in Internet Bandwidth : Companies take commercial high speed Internet for business reasons, and many companies block the Social Networking Sites for consuming the bandwidth.
Why Thinkers Think Companies Shouldn’t ban?
“When web filtering first became an option for companies, we generally saw them block access to typical categories, such as pornography, illegal activities and hate and discrimination. I imagine, before long, social networking will be up there with pornography in terms of categories blocked.” said ScanSafe spokesman Spencer Parker.
James Norrie, the associate dean and professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management, is against the move and he harshly criticizes the trend.
He said banning employees from using social-networking sites is “one of the most awful things businesses can do to themselves. The whole notion of trying to take technology away from [employees] is as good as spanking them and sending them to their room,”.
Trend in India
India is a country where business (mostly IT) are run by the principle of low cost. It has very less of product oriented and innovative companies, and is hugely dominated by BPO/ITes companies. These companies try to get maximum of the employees, and hardly care about their welfare. The reason — India has abundant talent and companies can easily replace the talent.
It is a common practice in India companies to ban the Social Networking sites. As a market leader in India, Orkut gets the first ban notice. Others follow.
Many Indian companies also ban E-mail clients like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail along with the Internet Messengers. Their reasons to ban are mostly bandwidth consumption and data security, while I believe the move to be oriented to make people work long hours without break.
The situation is however changing now, and companies are fighting hard to acquire and retain good talent. This is forcing companies to relax such norms, and company leaders are realizing the importance of making work environment joyful. They are not only providing good infrastructure for gaming and entertainment; companies are being open to let employees use Social Networks and messengers. I can feel this change by the seeing the increase in the number of my friends being online during work hours.
Ending Thoughts
Companies should actually promote the use of Social Networks at work. They should teach their employees on the effective use of social media like Twitter and Facebook.
In big companies there is always huge hidden talent, which goes unnoticed. This can be tapped when people are let work in open and fair environment. Employees with good interpersonal skills can actually turn to become ‘Rain Getters’, and bring projects (and thus revenue) for the company.
The other big advantage companies get is the brand visibility. If 80 thousand employees of Infosys tweet five good sentences about Infosys in a month, then its 400 thousand positive Tweets. This volume can change how people think about Infosys in the Internet.
Here is a example how volume works in the Online World.
(Picture : What Internet Thinks of Airtel? Source : http://www.whatdoestheinternetthink.net )
The negative brand image of Airtel (as in pic) can easily be washed away if they educate their employees on Social Networks and have them be the brand ambassadors. The above conclusion is derived from around 2000 search results by Google. Think, how does the graph change if 1% of Airtel employees (1k of 100k) blog positive on Airtel, 5% employees (5k tweets) Tweet, 10% discuss in Facebook or Orkut (10k updates)? The negative brand image will be instantly cleaned.
The other way is to use Social Networks for customer care. Twitter can be the best friend in monitoring people’s complaints and solve it. Its fast (real time), its effective (reaches to mass) and its free.
Are the companies listening?
One Response
Your Comments A nice article , it is wrong to ban the social media sites at work places.Workers should be educated to use these sites in proper way.On the other hand,restricting access to social media can result in increased work efficiency because of lack of diversion .