By Nick Collins
Published: 12:01AM GMT 26 Oct 2009Comments 7 | Comment on this article
More than half of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook for personal use during the working day Photo: REUTERSMore than half of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook for personal use during the working day, and admit wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.
One in three of the 1,460 office workers surveyed also said they had seen sensitive company information posted on social networking sites, leading to fears about how workers use the internet.
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Philip Wicks, consultant at Morse, the IT services and technology company who commissioned the survey, said the true cost to the economy could be substantially higher than the £1.38bn estimate.
“When someone is asked for their own use they say around 40 minutes a week, but when asked about their colleagues they say they say up to an hour a day. We have used the lower of those figures rather than the high point,” he said.
“It is the sort of thing people constantly use which means that its not quite the same as doing a crossword, where you spend half an hour on it and it is finished.
“When it comes to an office environment the use of these sites is clearly becoming a productivity black hole.
“Social networking can be a cause for good when it is used professionally but I think organisations need to wake up – that is not the way it is always being used.”
David Clubb, managing director of Office Angels, the recruitment firm, added: “As younger generations join the workplace, I believe UK businesses will, inevitably, have to embrace social networks, recognising the benefits of providing staff with well deserved downtime, but also their potential for business networking.”
Three quarters of the office workers surveyed said their employer had not given them any specific guidelines on how to use Twitter, but 84 per cent believed it should be up to them what they post online.
Last month staff at PC World and Currys were found to have posted offensive comments about customers on Facebook groups.
Some posters who said they were employed by the shops’ parent company, DSG, said some customers deserved to be punched, and asked if they should be allowed to “cattle prod” them.
British Airways staff used Facebook to complain about customers’ “stupid American accents” last year, while Virgin Atlantic employees referred to some passengers as “chavs”.
Here’s the comment I posted on Telegraph:
This story is boring, predictable nonsense…
It would be more interesting if Morse were to calculate how much Facebook and Twitter generate for the economy – jobs, collaborating on community projects, creating new business ideas, saving time on research.
For some advanced thinking on this, see management thinker John Hagel http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/john-hagel-on-the-social-web.html
Upshot: set people free on Twitter and stop wasting money on intranets and email…
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