Impact of social networking websites in the work place

Recently a 19 year old Pennsylvanian man has been arrested after stopping to check his account on social networking website Facebook whilst burgling a house, and then forgetting to log out again. Now why would anyone in the midst of any important work take time to surf facebook. The answer is social networking sites are addictive.

According to an article in telegraph an average user of facebook spent three days a year just surfing the website (excluding the time spent on other social networking websites). The number of hours almost doubles for more avid users of the website.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6502237/Facebook-users-spend-three-solid-days-a-year-on-the-site.html


Many managers in big companies think of this as a serious problem to deal with. They would argue that, apart from the coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, lunch breaks and restroom breaks, this new found way of employees to unwind themselves poses a new threat to the productivity of the employees and so the access to these websites must be banned (I myself worked in a big company that restricted access to social networking websites, blogs). Giles Ridgeway, a leading consultant at Employment Law Advisory Services (ELAS) says Facebook is a "curse and some staff are failing to do the job they’re paid for because they’re spending too much time on such websites" This has prompted many of the bosses to think about a ten minute facebook break for their employees.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6168620/Office-workers-to-be-given-10-minute-Facebook-break.html


On the other hand, imagine that you are developing an application using .Net framework with your team and you hit a roadblock that none of you can solve. What do you do? Ask in a forum like this one.
And also most Job consultancy firms practically depend on the social networking websites for their entire business.

Apart from the inherent benefits present by allowing access to social networking websites, some of the younger employees refuse to join or quit the organisation if access to these websites is denied.

http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2218385/workers-consider-quitting

So this brings us to the question should the organisations pay the employees while they waste precious resources (clogging up corporate bandwidth) of the company on social websites or should they impose an outright ban on the social websites.

I think that there is no single solution to this question. Social networking websites may work for or against you. The organisation should, based on the designation, type of work, and performance of the employee, decide on what kind of access he/she may be permitted.