subject: Banning And Avoiding Social Media Can Be Bad For Your Business [print this page] Companies are now worried about the increasing use of social media by their employees.Companies are concerned their employees are not working hard enough because of all the distractions that social media present. More and more companies are having their IT departments block popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter,MySpace, Flickr, Multiply, etc. Companies are concerned because they don't often don't know how these media can benefit their business. To them social media are nothing more than distractions to workers.
According to Drew McLellan, owner of the McLellan Marketing Group, social media can cause lowered productivity but they also present wonderful opportunities for companies to reach a much wider audience. Social media present workers with opportunities to network, gain ideas for their own work and gain other benefits. Employees who are "connected" get plenty of information online that they can use to boost their own performance at work.
What companies must think about is how they can harness the power of social media instead of completely avoiding them. When a company begins to understand how it can take advantage of social media then it can begin to draft a social media plan and a social media policy to serve as guides for employees. Your goal is for your employees to use social media intelligently so they can benefit from them for their personal life as well as their work life.
One of the ways you can be sure that your employees are busy with work is to assign them tasks with measurable outputs. You just need to make sure that the tasks can be performed within a reasonable time.Workers are not robots and do need a bit of downtime to perform effectively at work.
What companies should develop is a company culture open about the use of social media because the employees can be trusted to use them the right way. More than blocking social media sites on the company internet servers, companies should nurture a culture wherein workers are responsible about their social media use and responsible about their work tasks. An inefficient worker will find ways to avoid doing work with or without access to social media. What you need to cultivate is a culture in the workplace where workers are efficient and happy to work even when no one is looking over their shoulders and monitoring every move they make.
Just imagine all the information and opportunities you could miss if you block websites and social media from your workplace- there are so many uses of social media.
