Blocking social sites: good management or pushing people to mobile Web?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Community, Business, Internet, Mobile, Microsoft on
Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?
A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.
I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.
Some people are losing access to IM as well, which is stupidly counter-productive because it’s a fantastic work tool. Blocking IM is like not providing a telephone. I’m less certain about work use of social networks and blogs, because although they have some work benefits like networking, it’s often the employee rather than the company that gets the benefits - I might be networking to find a contact for my current project but if I move on, that contact isn’t much use to my company. And while I could see your status on Facebook, I could see it on IM as well, without the potential distractions. And let’s face it, Facebook is 99% distraction…
The Telegraph reported last year that 70% of UK companies agree with me and are blocking sites like Facebook. But I - and they - might well be wrong. Dell announced today that it’s giving all employees access to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and other social sites because productivity issues pale into insignificance besides being out of touch with your customers. Dell opened up to Facebook weeks ago so staff could join in a competition it was running, but given how hard Dell is trying to look like a company that listens to customers, it’s useful for employees to be able to defend the company, solve user problems or just hear what its customers are saying to their friends. Passionate Dell employees are to feel more appreciated than the British Airways employees who defend the company in Facebook groups on their own time.
Marc Smith at Microsoft Research has spent years tracking online interactions - not to accuse people of wasting time, but to understand online social dynamics. He thinks Dell has the right idea because it’s finding out more about itself and “self awareness is such a powerful tool for businesses.” You could spend a lot of money on surveys, focus groups, BI tools and company meetings to find out what customers think of you and communicate that around the company. Or you could let everyone rub shoulders with customers and find out first hand.
If you want your employees keeping your users happy online, on top of not blocking their access, Smith suggests thinking of ways to give them credit for the time they put in helping them. Microsoft in Brazil was worried when all the discussion on a once-popular area of the official site went away; it turned out it had moved to a newsgroup that was tracked by Smith’s Netscan tool, because people liked being able to see when they contributed the most answers. If employees want access to Facebook, turn that into a business benefit by tracking who helps the most customers. Some supervision is going to be a good thing, along with a policy on what people can and can’t say; you can go into detail, or you can stick with something simple like the Microsoft blogging policy, which states that you have to be smart to work at Microsoft so don’t do anything stupid online.
But even if people are reading Facebook and LiveJournal and other sites for fun rather than work, I’m pretty sure management rather than censorship is the solution. This is nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with management and motivation. If you trust your users to have a phone on their desk and not spend the whole day talking to friends, can’t you trust them not to waste the day chatting in IM pr throwing food on Facebook?
People who lose a day to reading non-work Web pages of any kind - whether it’s Facebook or the BBC News or eBay or cat macros or anything else - are goofing off and you should be able to tell that through your normal management procedures. If you can’t tell whether someone is doing a good job by what they deliver, counting up the time they spend not working isn’t the answer, but monitoring is better than saying to your employees that you don’t trust them to behave professionally. Now that the work-life boundaries are not so much blurred as completely muddied, someone who spends an hour after lunch staying in touch with friends probably spends an hour after dinner catching up on work too.
I remember the week I discovered Usenet (my supervisor introduced me to it the first time we discussed my MSc thesis). I don’t remember much else I did that week; it was a huge distraction and I plunged straight in for hours on end. And at the end of the week I looked at how much time I’d wasted and thought ‘I’d better not spend too much time on this, I have work to do’.
Plus, once you’ve pushed them onto a mobile device that uses 3G rather than your Wi-Fi then you’ve lost all chance of tracking what they’re up to - and maybe they’re no longer as passionate about defending your company online either.
-Mary
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Loading ...Comment by Celestial Weasel - July 11, 2008 on 3:03 pm
Is there an LJ client yet? I found one for the iPhone that looked like it was one for jailbroken phones.
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