Social networks and employer dilemma

There is absolutely no doubt that connectivity is a must to work and live in modern society. Most formal jobs today require a computer with internet access and at home, internet usage has become increasingly popular mainly in the urban and suburban areas and has rapidly penetrated into rural areas across the country as well.

Social Networking sites, such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Friendster, and many others, after one is acclimated to the community becomes your cyber home; your home away from home. One's affinity for sites becomes evident by the fact that if your computer is down for a couple of days, or you can't log in for a few days for whatever reason, you actually miss the interaction of your favourite social networking site.

The employer ends up paying for this. But like in any other good thing, this also comes with numerous disadvantages particularly in the work environment. Productivity decreases as a result of employees checking social network accounts and some of them are even playing games online - who pays for all of this?

Are you aware of the cost of this habit by employees? How do you deal with it; stricter policy compliance or awareness - or both?

An employee's time has become increasingly expensive in every industry and more so in labour-intensive service industries. Employees should be clear that excessive personal internet use at work is not acceptable, similar to spending time on personal phone calls.

Self-discipline should take precedence over technical barriers. Of course, you may not be able to restrict access to some selected programs only, however, there are so many alternatives that simply override your restrictions. Employees can be monitored, but this seems to be an extreme situation. You might also think about blocking internet access but you should know that this is not a solution.

Sometimes employees have to research online about projects they are working on or as a part of the sales development process. So it's a dilemma for the employer.

What is really important is awareness. The employer has to make it clear that spending time online during working hours for activities not related to the job will not be tolerated because it affects the performance of the company. Integrity and loyalty to the organisation are natural attributes that would ensure sanity more than the imposition of technical barriers.

An employee doing social networking to unwind after a long leg of challenging work can be tolerated to some extent as the person has to unwind for a bit and who knows maybe new ideas will pop up - the human mind works in mysterious ways and strange things have happened. Some employees such as programmers or designers feel the need to relax, read and see things that are not related to their work to unwind.

Build greater employee integrity as the foundation. Correct assessment of the work load an employee can handle and monitoring productivity against that, would give you an idea of how much time might be available for an employee to engage in non-work related browsing.

Setting optimistic targets that will use the entire working hours with time to take breaks as required will discourage people from spending time on social networks.

If the targets are met, then it doesn't really matter whether an employee is logging on to Face book or not. If they are not being met, then this is a clear issue of incompetence or lack of commitment on the part of the employee which needs to be addressed.

If employees like to use their time off the clock to "tweet" or "update a status," then they are free to do so.

But they could also have a snack, make a phone call home or get a haircut, then it really doesn't matter.

Remember, companies figured out policies around personal phone calls way back and it was done without all the hand wringing and head scratching. This is no different. Clear policy guidelines to use social networks will help maintain productivity. But more important is the employee's integrity and loyalty which are primary demands to overcome this issue.