Is it right to ban Facebook at work?

Are you banning Facebook in your organisation? On Saturday The Telegraph reported that a fair amount companies are doing so, mainly because it’s a website that’s “not deemed necessary for business”:

[…More than two thirds of employers are banning or restricting the use of Facebook and similar sites over fears that staff are wasting time on them when they should be working, a survey found. Several companies have also warned employees that accessing the site during office hours is a sackable offence.

More than 70 per cent of businesses, including banks and law firms, have barred the sites. City firms are taking the lead, with Credit Suisse and Dresdner Kleinwort both banning employees from accessing them. But “Faceblocking” is spreading…]

As Neville Hobson writes, “This strikes me as extremely short-sighted and illustrative of a great lack of understanding by those who make decisions (often, IT people) as to the nature of how people want to make connections with others in our tightly networked world of today, as well as the blurring for many people between what are business and what are social connections.”

Neville and Shel Holtz both have some further great points on this topic, but there’s another reason why the process of banning the site may well cease to be effective:

Surely if employees are intent on using a site and now have other means to do so, you'd be better off looking at how you can embrace the concept?

And one more thing. As a different friend said to me recently, those companies banning Facebook because they don't trust employees and fear they're wasting time? They'd better not be the same companies who are, in the very next breath, talking about employee engagement.

Comments

[TAR ART RAT]

my employer's rules are "no personal emails or personal web surfing during work hours" but since facebook can/does hover in the gray area between personal and business - I'm just not going to ask if we are allowed to use it... and wait, see if facebook can't prove some results int terms of networking by the time they figure out I'm using using it... then perhaps it will be allowed, we'll see what happens.

[Marcus Heap]

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