Study: social media policies can make your employees more productive

Didit Editorial

8 years ago

June 22, 2016: Back in March, we noted that having a social media policy in place can reduce the chance of one of your workers causing – intentionally or inadvertently – a reputational disaster.

But social media policies aren’t just effective at shielding your company from bad interactions with the world at large; it turns out that having one in place can make your employees more effective by reducing the time they spent using social media for personal reasons while at work.

According to the Pew Research Center – which yesterday released a new study, Social Media and the Workplace — workers whose companies have social media policies in place are significantly less likely to use Facebook, Twitter, or other network for non-work related activities that eat up time and sap staff productivity.

Why this matters

There have been many efforts to quantify the economic impact of non-work related social media use, but little agreement on how much economic damage is really being done by this kind of behavior. Facebook alone – according to published reports – accounts for some 10.5 billion minutes spent each day browsing its content – a fair share of these minutes are spent by people at work, and most of this content is “recreational,” not professionally-oriented. According to one 2012 study, “1 in 10 workers spends more time on the Internet than they do working, with Facebook being the chief source of “most popular time wasting site” (followed by LinkedIn, CNN, Amazon, YouTube, and ESPN.com).

At the same time, however, it’s wrong to suggest that all social media usage at the workplace is wrong or destructive of business productivity. Workers may use the internet to research solutions to business problems, establish business relationships, and otherwise promote the objectives of the business, which can offset any productivity losses suffered through social media “mental breaks.”

Consequently, it’s important that any social media policy you put into place respects the way you want your employees to use social media, as well as your enterprise’s unique culture. Such a policy should discourage time-wasting, but not be so heavy-handed as to discourage productive uses of the internet and social media networks. And no policy – however well it strikes this balance – should be regarded as being “written in stone.” Instead, it must evolve – serving as a living document that can adapt to the rapidly changing ways that people – at work, at home, or in between – use the internet in our modern connected world.

What to do

The good news is that many companies – large and small – have been down this road before, and have labored to strike the right balance in the policies they’ve drafted in response to the social media productivity challenge. You can find their collected wisdom compiled at the Social Media Policy Database. In all likelihood, there will be a policy there that you can – with a bit of customization – will function effectively to staunch the flow of wasted time at your own business.