Should you block Facebook at work?

Richie-from-the-Boro

Beast wrote: »

We're a huge organisation (>100,000 employees) and have a totally open policy on internet usage. Productivity is measured in the job getting done well, not in hours or minutes spent doing this task or that so if someone feels they need to take time out to chill on facebook, that's their personal call.

100k - UK or worldwide ?, it's not NHS, so must be BT !, that explains my rip off telephone charges.

The BT social network [ creative industries ] was supposed to be internal and to make collaborating on projects easier.

Creative juice [ internet ] requirement I can understand. I have no idea how many in favour posters to this thread work in a creative industry but I'll hazard a guess that less than one percent could defend their facebook on those grounds.

weegie.geek

There are plenty of ways to waste time at work, but not many give the impression of actually doing work.

45 minutes on the lav reading the paper is a bit more obvious than 45 minutes blethering on facebook.

edit: @ Kelly - you're a consultant for PAN. Quit your spamming, it makes your employer look bad.

Beast

Richie-from-the-Boro wrote: »

100k - UK or worldwide ?, it's not NHS, so must be BT !, that explains my rip off telephone charges.

The BT social network [ creative industries ] was supposed to be internal and to make collaborating on projects easier.

Creative juice [ internet ] requirement I can understand. I have no idea how many in favour posters to this thread work in a creative industry but I'll hazard a guess that less than one percent could defend their facebook on those grounds.

100K worldwide, the UK employee base is pretty small (<3,000). So not guilty on the telephone bills front

Richie-from-the-Boro

814man wrote: »

Interesting views here and I’d like to hear some others. This is an issue I am currently looking at as the IT Security Manager in a large public sector organisation. We currently block Facebook on technical grounds related to bandwidth etc but to be honest these are no longer an issue for us in IT. The other views about time wasted are a bit more complex to define. There are so many ways an employee could waste time that can we really say we need to block a specific site such as Facebook. Should we also ban newspapers from the workplace?

Depends on how you define workplace :

- if you mean reading a newspaper in the workplace in work time - it is already actionable.
- if you mean reading a newspaper in the workplace in personal time time / break etc., that's fine.
- if you mean reading a newspaper in the workplace in work time ref #33 that's already actionable if caught & proven.

If your organisation already has x amount of opportunities for the lazy to steal time that I'm paying for. Provisioning one more extra ' facebook ' way to steal my money is reprehensible. If I was Director of Personnel / HR sitting at board level and any employee [ IT or otherwise ] at any level in the operation brought a suggestion such as you make:

- I would closely question how your appointment to your role was decided
- re-read my psychometric reports on you to see why I had failed
- reassess the ' traits and dispositions ' analysis on both yourself and the role you are appointed to
- decide how you slipped through the net
- and make appropriate changes to ensure it never happens again

Lil306

The whole point of going to work is that "work", going on facebook is a skive.

Using it during personal time is OK, but anywhere outside of working hours should be dealt with, as for newspapers etc, that's also in work time so you should be working

814man

Richie, please stop living in the 1970’s. I have 20 staff the majority of whom are classed as agile workers meaning they work from different locations around our area of responsibility all the time, including at home. We have a very small office area with a meeting room and a few shared desks. The idea of a workplace as a fixed desk where you work from 9 to 5 with set breaks is unheard of where I work. We manage staff based on their work output as opposed to did they get to the office at 3 minutes past 9 this morning.
Thanks to all the very sensible views expressed on here, they have been useful.

Lil306

814man wrote: »

Richie, please stop living in the 1970’s. I have 20 staff the majority of whom are classed as agile workers meaning they work from different locations around our area of responsibility all the time, including at home. We have a very small office area with a meeting room and a few shared desks. The idea of a workplace as a fixed desk where you work from 9 to 5 with set breaks is unheard of where I work. We manage staff based on their work output as opposed to did they get to the office at 3 minutes past 9 this morning.
Thanks to all the very sensible views expressed on here, they have been useful.

It varies which office you are in to be honest, some are absolutely anal, and some are completely laid back as long as the work is done.

Richie-from-the-Boro

814man wrote: »

Richie, please stop living in the 1970’s. I have 20 staff the majority of whom are classed as agile workers meaning they work from different locations around our area of responsibility all the time, including at home. We have a very small office area with a meeting room and a few shared desks. The idea of a workplace as a fixed desk where you work from 9 to 5 with set breaks is unheard of where I work. We manage staff based on their work output as opposed to did they get to the office at 3 minutes past 9 this morning.
Thanks to all the very sensible views expressed on here, they have been useful.

#1 Should you block Facebook at work?

Maybe the O/P will tell the group if he / she intended the above question to include organisations such as your own ' Out of Office /and / or / Flexible Worker ' classification.

For the purpose of my posts I did not assume the OO1 / OO2 group employees or even flexible worker designated individuals as the intended target group the question was intended to address.

At 15% [ 2008-2009 ] of the UK / Euro workforce your company working practice is not mainstream employment and has a whole different set of employment characteristics, typically they are almost always exclusively negotiated between the manager and a single individual, they do not and were never intended to fall within the scope of my response and have a whole different subset of :

- law
- custom & practice
- case law
- tribunal law

I'm not in the 70's and whilst you may argue that the law and morals surrounding the original question is .. .. that's a whole~different~other~issue.

If you define the norm as the major part of 100% "" The idea of a workplace as a fixed location where people work an 8 hour pattern with set breaks "" is still the norm.

You are comparing an apple with an orange my friend, most people here would love to have the flexibility your company's working practices allow, but they do not.

- If funfunfun intended the question to be aimed exclusively at your own minority employment area, speak up funfunfun.

- If funfunfun intended the question to be encompass all groups including your own minority employment area, that of course is ok.

- If you wish to ask the same question aimed exclusively at your own minority employment area, start a new thread.

I read a report by a well known group promoting OO & FW about a decade ago where they predicted about 60% of the UK would be engaged in this area by 2010. I've just checked the same group and even their research group docs make no such current predictions.

814man

Richie
Appreciate the variable definition of workplace has complicated this. Even within my organisation we have differing styles of working so my question actually has to apply to all staff and therefore is applicable to the small number of office based staff as well as those who are agile. All our staff however do have the option and ability to work in a flexible way, such as at home or outside standard hours, so long as tasks get done. The facebook issue then becomes more meaningless when I can be, as indeed I am today, sat at home working on the business proposal for relaxing the restriction on access to and use of social networks on our corporate network on my work laptop, but with my personal computer on next to me and occasionally doing other stuff like posting on MSE and checking my facebook account.
I’d be interested in any links to authoritative research in this area. I have found a few specific IT Security reports which seem to say that if used appropriately then social network sites are not a haven for viruses and Trojans etc, but very few that address the time issue in anything more than a “best not to just in case” view.

Badger_Lady

I've seen a lot of useful articles on this subject but unfortunately can't access them from work...