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Social Networking's Potential and Peril
HR professionals face a dilemma about social-networking. While such sites are useful for sourcing new clients and job applicants as well as facilitating a feeling of community within the company, they can also decrease productivity and increase security risks.
The managers at Coastal Contacts were getting disturbed by what they saw as they strolled through the company's call center. All too often, they'd see an employee chatting on the phone with a customer while the employee's eyes were glued to his or her computer screen, which -- instead of customer or company data -- displayed a page from Facebook.com or some other social-networking site. At the same time, productivity -- measured in the number of calls per day handled by each employee -- was beginning to trend downward. "It got to the point where we decided to eliminate access to those sites for our call-center employees," says Jenny Harvey, communications manager for the Vancouver, B.C.-based online retailer of contact lenses and eyeglasses. Coastal Contacts is far from the only employer that blocks access to social-networking sites during work hours. A survey of 200 HR professionals during the Society for Human Resource Management's annual conference in Chicago this June by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago found that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) said their companies restrict employees from visiting these sites during work hours, while one-third said they consider the sites a major drain on worker output. Meanwhile, online social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, are becoming increasingly popular. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 22 percent of Americans use an online social-networking site in 2007, up from just 7 percent in 2005. The popularity of these sites presents employers with a dilemma. On one hand, they can be a tremendous distraction: Users can spend hours visiting the personal pages of their friends and colleagues and updating their own, trading tidbits of information about their upcoming weekend plans, who did what to whom and other matters having nothing whatsoever to do with work. But these sites can also be quite useful to businesses -- by allowing employees to collaborate online, reach out to potential customers and get quick answers to work-related questions. The dilemma was certainly acute at Coastal Contacts, says Harvey. "There was a lot of back-and-forth among management about [blocking access] -- it was not an easy decision," she says. Ultimately, the company blocked access from the call-center computers, but decided to allow workers to use computers in a training area to visit the sites during breaks. Coastal Contacts' sales employees, however, continue to use Facebook and its ilk to find new customers, says Harvey. The call-center employees -- the majority of them members of Generation Y -- took the news well, she says. "There wasn't any real outcry, partly because of the break policy." The harm to companies from social-networking sites can go beyond productivity problems, says Dean Boland, an attorney in Lakewood, Ohio who specializes in technology law. "If an employee accidentally, or intentionally, discloses sensitive company information on their personal page, it can spread very, very quickly," he says. "These sites are very heavily trafficked." Employers must figure out how to craft their policies so they can reap the potential benefits of these sites while avoiding the downsides, says Boland. "One potential approach is to give new employees a choice: Tell them if they have a page on Facebook or MySpace, they can either take it down, or give someone from the company access to that page so they can monitor what the employee puts up there," he says. Boland acknowledges such a policy would be highly unpopular with most new hires: "You'd alienate a lot of potential talent." Eric Papp, a Tampa-based consultant who delivers seminars on working with and recruiting Gen Y and a regular user of Facebook himself, says blocking access to social-networking sites isn't necessarily a bad idea, but employers should be choosy about which employees to restrict. "If you have a call center with a lot of Gen Y workers, these sites can simply be fuel for them to spread gossip about one another," he says. In those situations, blocking access can make sense. However, HR should consider being more flexible with professional-level employees, he adds. "You can say to a professional, 'As long as you're getting your work done, we're not going to restrict you,' " says Papp. Indeed, the majority of respondents to the Challenger survey -- 59 percent -- said their companies don't have a formal policy regarding the use of social-networking sites in the workplace, and nearly half said it's OK for employees to use the sites as long as it doesn't interfere with their productivity. Then there's the much-vaunted multitasking capabilities of Gen Y, says Papp, adding that it's a factor HR should consider when deciding whether to restrict access to the sites. "These are people who grew up simultaneously watching The Simpsons, doing their homework, instant-messaging someone and eating a plate of macaroni and cheese," he says. "How much does being online actually take away from their productivity?" In fact, says Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing at FaceTime, a Belmont, Calif.-based software company, social-networking sites can potentially help an organization by fostering teamwork among employees. "One of the most significant aspects of social-networking technology I've seen is its ability to break down barriers within the organization," he says. "When people feel they have some kind of social relationship with others in the company, there tends to be greater collaboration between them." Some companies actually use Facebook to set up online communities that are password-restricted to their own employees, says Cabri. "About 3,000 organizations have set up these communities, and they use them from everything to announcing the next all-hands meeting to finding out whether anyone has the answer to a particular business-related question." Companies risk alienating existing and potential employees by banning access to those sites, he says. "Many people feel they have a right to use these tools and you risk having them revolt when you deny access," says Cabri. But Papp says employers shouldn't worry too much: "I've worked with lots of Gen Y people and I've never heard any of them say they'd quit a job or refuse to work at a company because they weren't allowed access to Facebook or MySpace," he says. "Anyone who says that -- well, you probably wouldn't want that person working for you in the first place because they probably have a whole other bag of issues."
July 31, 2008 Copyright 2008© LRP Publications |
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