When I started work for a utilities company during a placement year from university in 1991/92, all personal calls from your desk telephone were banned. If you wanted to make a personal call you had to use the office payphone. That’s right you had to wander out of the office to a payphone that for us was located on a different floor at the other end of the office. Sounds ludicrous now doesn’t it? I can’t recall the exact reason given at the time, but I’m sure cost and time wasting were quoted.
So I have a wry smile when I see articles like this one “One in Two U.K. Companies Block Social Networking Web Sites”.
To me the banning of social sites is just a ludicrous as the scenario I encountered in 1991. The common reasons for blocking given are:
- Time wasting costing firms money
- Legal risks, i.e. disclosure of confidential or proprietary information
For both blocking sites to me seems totally ineffective. In the age of Smartphones and Netbooks with wireless internet access (either WiFi or 3G) employees can and will use their own personal devices to access sites if they can’t from their work PC.
To me more effective methods are:
- For the first, surely a much simpler and effective answer is to manage your staff. This was what the utility industry had decided for the telephone by the time I returned to take a full time role in 1993.
- Surely a good policy written to explain to employees what is expected of them in terms of posting online? If you want to start one for your firm take a look at this great resource of social media policies.
I know first hand how social media can be a big distraction if not managed (I’ve started turning off my RSS reader during the day for this very reason), but it can also be a valuable source of information if used the right way. For law firms, in an age where we need lawyers to be as “clued up” as possible on social networks (see my last post!), banning them seems a step backwards!
So what does your firm do? Post in the comments and let us know (you can leave the firm name out if you wish).
Unfortunately, I would guess that many of the companies blocking access to social media sites are doing so without any other policy or employee education. As you point out, we no longer need the companies internet connection to access these sites. I can do something stupid on my iPhone as easily as I could my work computer.
There are lots of ways to waste time. I think most companies would want you to be wasting time while sitting at your desk, so that you can easily be reached when needed. Facebook will at least keep you sitting in your chair, as opposed to going to another floor to make a phone call.
All social networking is banned, twitter, facebook everything, anything that is instant messaging is also banned.
Any webmail is banned but weirdly linkedin is acceptable.
Reason quoted: several very large customers of ours see this as time wasting and a security risk and during their security audits of us as a service provider if we were found to allow these things they would withdraw their business – These are not small businesses or contracts.
Personally i think its stupid.