Social media access is more important to workers than pay or job title
If you want to motivate your staff to succeed, then trusting them to manage their own time--and use the Net when they like, including for accessing social networks--could get you better results than offering more pay, says new data.
Over 1,600 managers and staff were surveyed by Clearswift (a firm specializing in "unifying information security") for this research, covering the U.K., Australia, Germany, and the USA during the first two months of 2010. The headline figure from Clearswift's resulting report, "Web 2.0 in the Workplace," is that over 79% of respondents said that the most important feature of a workplace for them, above job title and even pay, is to be trusted to organize their own work schedule and have free access to the Net.
When I linked to a piece on Forrester's findings that social media makes workers more productive, one of my Facebook friends left a comment that began, "I think employees should enjoy social media...on their own time and on their own dime. Why should an employer foot the bill to support a FaceBook addiction to Farmville? Work is work. Play is play."
Based on that view, are we to think that 79% of employees think they should be able to play at work? If so, it's even more shocking to find that the Clearswift survey, released in May, found that 21% of respondents said they would turn down a job offer that restricted access to social sites.
Of course, the Facebook comment reflects the views of a lot of IT departments and managers out there (the study found that only 51% of management-level respondents felt the same way as their employees). They just fail to recognize that that the old adage "work is work, play is play" is no longer true. I don't know anyone who doesn't take their laptop on vacation. Most knowledge workers do company business from home, Starbucks and just about anywhere else. Most knowledge workers check their company email from bed before they turn out the lights.
The measure of productivity is not where work is getting done, but just that it's getting done. The notion of work-life balance -- that you work only when you're at the office and when you're not, you don't work at all -- is increasingly becoming a relic of the pre-connected age.
Note that the issue revolves around trust. One of the things that has always bothered me the most about blanket blocking of access is the message it sends to every employee: "We don't trust any of you. Not a single one of you." And yet the company hopes that employees will be actively engaged.
Add to that the fact that many employees rely on Facebook, Twitter and other sites to do their work, and the fact that companies are leaving piles of money on the table when they ignore the value that exists in employees' online connections, and it makes sense to open access for employees (governed by well-communicated policies).
But you already knew I felt that way, didn't you?
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