Twitter and Facebook Social Networking for Employees?

Twitter and Facebook social networking applications are being used by employees in the workplace throughout South Africa on a regular basis. For many employers this is a massive problem as these networking sites can become quite addictive and take away a lot of production from a company due to workers spending more time than they probably should be when using them. Now it is very difficult for an employer to restrict the use of this if I am not mistaken unless they use certain blocking methods. Which is all very well but you only need type into google unblock facebook and you will be given many different solutions to get through the blocking and access your account again.

Besides that, it is even harder to stop someone then switching to using their mobile phone!!

So how do you restrict access to the Twitter and Facebook social networking platforms in order to get employees to focus on the work they are being paid for instead of poking, tweeting, gorping over hottie of the day or chatting to friends? Good question, one I do not have the answer to but if I did I could probably make quite a bit of money with it! In the past I have believed that an employee needs to be given a certain dose of freedom in order to keep them happy and I truly believe that a happy worker is a productive worker. But a line somehow needs to be drawn with something like this as unless an employer is watching over a workers shoulder all day it is really hard to control.

Some companies of course use these social networking platforms to market and maintain business. This just makes it even more of a dilema for companies doing this to control how much time is spent using the applications for actual work reasons and how much is personal. Many organisations in South Africa are absolutely fine with workers using these applications as and when they please and make no effort in trying to block Facebook or Twitter. Some try to block access to music downloading sites such as iTunes and certain dating websites. Others put measures in place to block an employees access to YouTube.

You may well be wondering what my point is or where this article is going and the truth is there is no point and it is going nowhere. I was just sitting down with a cup of coffee today and thinking about how these social networking websites are affecting businesses in SA and thinking it would be interesting to know how many companies block employees from using Facebook, Twitter and other applications. If you have any thoughts on this topic, feel free to comment below as usual, if you came here looking for a genuine way to unblock Facebook or Twitter, don’t ask me!