Social Networking: The New Workplace Smoke Break 105
snydeq writes "J. Peter Bruzzese sees a solution for organizations seeking to cut down employee time spent on social networks at work: treat social networking like a smoke break. 'Try as you might to keep social networks at bay, mobile devices let people be in constant connection to their social networking vices over the cellular networks, which you can't block. Still, it's not completely impossible to stop social time-wasting over mobile: You can establish policies that, if enforced strongly enough, eliminate social networks from being accessed on company time. Treat it like smoking: Let employees take a 15-minute coffee/smoking/Facebook break and make them go to a designated area to do it.'"
Slacking is slacking (Score:5, Interesting)
Ummm, that is what they are proposing (Score:5, Interesting)
They are saying "Let employees take a 15-minute coffee/smoking/Facebook break." That isn't even in the article, that is on the damn Slashdot post. I think it is reasonable to RTFP at least.
The reason employers worry about unrestricted Facebook access is because some employees will slack hard with it. I've seen it at work, and have friends who have seen it: People who will spend hours a day messing around on Facebook not doing anything useful.
This is a proposal saying "Don't ban it, workers need a break. Let them take a break and use it a reasonable amount."
Re:It's not a "right" (Score:5, Interesting)
That's always been a problem historically, at least in the tech/computer industry, and I suspect others as well.
The PHB's have no metrics to evaluate the people and technologies that they control but do not understand. So, they use the only yardstick they have at their disposal - judging people by their employee skills; i.e. showing up to work on time, not taking excessive breaks, etc.
Kind of sucks, but it's been that way as long as I can remember, probably longer (and I'm 50...).