Social Networking - A Menace Or an Assurance of Employee Productivity?

With one in every four business houses in India blocking "Facebook", it looks like the Indian companies too will have to come up with a 10-minute 'Facebook break' that is widely being practiced in European Countries. As per a new study, Indian employees are found wasting as much as one hour on the social networking sites at work.

As per the survey by Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham) conducted in the year 2009, found that 77 percent of the total employees accessed any of the social networking site during their work hours and around 40 percent of them built their profiles during office hours. This actually reflects the mindset of an employee, who has started to believe that it is perfectly acceptable to browse the internet during work hours.

However, there are other surveys which contradict above findings. A research project conducted by the University of Melbourne found that employees spending a reasonable amount of time surfing the internet at work are more productive by almost 9 per cent. The workplace is now being redefined these days which allows employees to be flexible. An employee-friendly organisation is bound to be more productive.

These surveys fail to directly show a relation between total time lost on the internet while socialising and employee's productivity. The output of an employee is dependent on a number of factors.

Networking through web is definitely an addiction. However there is no evidence that such addiction affects the productivity of a worker. Employers cannot ask workers to turn away from social interaction at the workplace. Employees engage socially during lunch breaks. Now the question arises, "Employers are not restricting on talking over the phone or going out for lunch, then why stopping the employees from surfing on the Web?"

A word of advice: Employers however should not go by the surveys alone; they need to seek advice from fellow competitors about the pros and cons of usage of social networking sites. Even though few surveys say social networking might increase worker productivity, the perception of networking as a time-wasting activity definitely seems to dominate most companies' mind. Hence before allowing or restricting usage of social networking sites, an employer must evaluate its advantages and disadvantages.

Apart from wastage of quality time, employers also need to keep an eye on what employees are blabbering about them on the Web. Employees are found to make Tweets about their new and old sulking bosses. This has brought a new type of boss and staff relation.

According to a study, employee taking short breaks can concentrate more however; the study finds employee productive who used these sites for less than 20 mins of their total work hours.

Finally, taking a cue from networking sites, business houses are however beginning to create internal company networking sites. Infosys has an internal portal called Managers' Network, through which the employees connect with each other. The site is built along the lines of Wikipedia. IBM has come up with IBM Lotus Connections 2.5, which is networking software that empowers professionals to remain in contact with the network of their colleagues. IBM Lotus is used by corporate like Colgate, Axis Bank, TCS, Wipro, and Asian Paints.