Social Media in the Workplace

A recent survey by Robert Half Technology asked CIOs about policies regarding the use of social media in the workplace and found that over half (54%) prohibited the use of social media in the workplace completely.

Now, I can understand the impulse to ban the use of social media. It's easy to assume that Twitter and Facebook will cut into worker productivity.  I can remember the same thing happening in the early days of the Internet, and there's a lesson to be learned there. Today, the Internet is an extremely important productivity tool in most organizations.

A pleasant memory came back to me when I read the survey. A number of years ago, I was touring a well known European brewery. The tour guide told the story of a policy change concerning workers drinking during their shifts. The old policy: each worker was allowed 6 beers per shift. The new policy: each worker could drink as many beers as they wanted per shift. The result: beer consumption at the brewery went down.

So what's the relevance of this story to social media? Well, of course, beer drinking should be a social activity, but that's not it.

The real relevance is in the empowerment of your employees.

When you ban social media in the workplace, you're telling your employees that you don't trust them. But if you want all your employees to be ambassadors for your company, then you have to empower them to communicate your company's message by all available media. If your customers use social media, so should your employees. If you want to begin a conversation with your customers (because a conversation is exactly what marketing should be), then you need to empower everyone within the company to be part of that conversation, to be a marketer.

Sure, there will likely be abuse, as there still is with Internet use in the office, but that's a question of motivation, not technology. Twenty years ago, people played solitaire on their computers more than they worked. It seemed like a total waste of time, but in reality it was a way for users to become proficient with a mouse. Twitter and Facebook may not seem to have much relevance for your employees' productivity, but the social media skills learned there are transferable to business applications, and if your employees are going to make social media mistakes, it's better that those mistakes are at their personal expense, rather than the company's.

If you don't have any nails, you'll never learn to use a hammer properly.