A survey by a firm of recruitment consultants has shown that more than 50% of employees admit to using social media during working hours. More than 33% claim to spend more than 30 minutes per day on “the likes of” Facebook, MySpace and Twitter during working hours, costing the UK up to £14 billion in “lost productivity”. Click here for the report in Personnel Today.
I love these surveys – where do these numbers come from? £14 billion – how is it made up? Is there any method or is it just a figure plucked from the air? Undoubtedly there is a risk to employers from the use (and abuse) of social media at work: I’ve written about it several times before. But, these surveys make no assessment of the positive value of social media to employers. Was all the “wasted time” purely incurred in Flossie arranging her social diary with Gertie? Is it not possible she might have been tweeting about her employer’s business? Even if I am being naive, employers should consider drawing upon this expertise and use it to promote their businesses through social media. Traditional ways of working are disappearing – for instance, secretarial roles will slowly disappear as voice recognition systems allow documents to be typed straight from dictation without a human getting in the way. Lawyers may well disappear as more and better online systems develop to explain people’s legal rights to them. Workers will need to be more flexible and there will be a greater need for all the various social media channels to be maintained. Heaven knows I struggle to keep up with my blogs and I love writing! Employers need to be channelling their employees’ usage of social media into positive ways of promoting their businesses. The answer, as I keep saying, is for employers to have a social media policy that sits within their overall social media strategy.
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