Employers Crack Down on Networking
Facebook and Myspace Off Limits to Some At Work
With the growing use of social networking websites while at work, companies are losing billions of dollarrs all over the world in productivity.
Employers have recently been cracking down on employees who spend company time on social networking websites such as Facebook and Myspace. Even in European countries, such as England, where they have found their employees spend at least 30 minutes and as much as three hours on these sites at work each day.
England alone is losing several billion dollars a year in employee productivity. Fearing the same, several U.S. companies are beginning to block access to Facebook and Myspace at the workplace. Employers are beginning to see that any benefits that these networking sites have to the companies are being replaced by employees’ desires to chat with friends and family.
According to their website, Facebook itself has 70 million registered users and is the 6th most trafficked website and 2nd most trafficked social media site in the world. It is true that mainly young people use the site, the average age being about 25 years old. However, over half of all Facebook users are outside of college.
One of Facebook’s main uses is photo sharing, uploading over 14 million photos each day. It is also big in creating user groups. Currently, there are 6 million active user groups on the site. While this could be a useful networking tool among companies, the distraction of these other applications makes Facebook an ultimately unnecessary site that does more harm than good.
Users can send each other custom made bumper stickers, jokes, pictures, friend requests, group requests, quizzes and over 200,000 of these other for-fun-only applications with 140 new applications being added each day. Even a user who is using Facebook for company purposes cannot keep themselves from being bombarded with these applications from friends and other users. Over 95 percent of these users are said to have used at least one of these applications at some point.
While the United States is Facebook’s number one customer, versions of the site are used all over the world. The United Kingdom ranks second to the U.S. in the number of active users, totaling 8 million users. Behind them is Canada followed by Turkey, Australia, France, Sweden, Norway, Colombia and South Africa.
According to the Chicago Tribune, employees are using other distracting features on the computer besides Myspace and Facebook. Some instant message while they work while others play music from their I-pods. Some employers don’t mind these activities as long as their employees continue to work while others are taking the same approach as the networking problem and banning these activities all together. However, as long as there are distracting things to do with the computer, employees will find ways to become distracted from their work.
For more information on Facebook, visit http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics.
