October 2007 – Facebook – workplace scourge or saviour?

Some years ago I was sitting at my terminal one day in the office when the editor wandered over to the desk, trying - and failing - to adopt a casual manner, and asked me what I was doing. His curiosity seemed so artificial it was unnerving.

This out-of-character amble through the office had “management training” stamped all over it. Here he was, playing out the classroom theory on engaging with your staff. This is fine if you have an outgoing personality but a meeting of two introverted journalists was bound to create some unease.

The immediate problem was working out the meaning of his question. Did he want to know what I was doing at that very moment, did he want a summary of the past hour or did he want a general overview of the previous few days?

Suppressing a slightly autistic tendency towards precision, I decided that “staring out of the window” would be an unsatisfactory response. Nor was there very much I could salvage from the past hour or so, but there was “the project.” Everyone whose work comes anywhere within reach of a manager needs an emergency project sitting somewhere to hand.

The emergency project is a piece of work designed to be used defensively like a pole to repel all boarders. Ideally it has been sanctioned by someone reasonably senior so that you can say: “I am working on this for so-and-so.” It is a necessary parry to one of those thrusting managers intent on extending their power.

In this case, however, its use was purely ceremonial allowing both parties to feign interest for a few seconds ahead of a graceful disengagement in the same way that the Queen passes from one dignitary to the next when she is working a line.

Any senior manager who chooses to spend most of his or her time isolated in a personal office understands the perils of fraternisation with employees during office hours. If people are busy you are simply getting in the way; if they are not busy you are an embarrassment.

But it is the lack of workplace “busy-ness” just now that is troubling managers. There have always been office distractions – the crossword, gossip, games. Now, however, there is a new craze, social networking, that simply involves doing all the things you used to do among colleagues, but on screen, publicly, among a broader network of people.

That social networking is beginning to concern managers was apparent in a recent web-based poll carried out by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development among human resources managers. A fifth of the 162 managers who responded to the poll had banned visits to these sites in work time and nearly a quarter had drawn up or planned to draw up policies covering employee involvement in social networking.

It’s right that companies should be concerned about an invasive technology that not only has a strong potential for distracting staff but that also can become a focus for dissension either against an organisation or of individuals within the organisation. Schools and universities have already suffered in this way.

But my instincts would be to side with the 40 per cent of managers in the CIPD poll who said that they trusted employees to “do the right thing.” That is not to say that managers should turn a blind eye to these sites, particularly if people are using them to disparage their colleagues.

Comet, the electrical goods retailer, for example, has drawn up a code of conduct in reaction to employees posting comments about the company on internet sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

Some companies have installed blocking filters but a technological response simply invites counter technology. A number of bypass filters are available on the web.

If internet-based social networking has revealed anything about companies it is the extent of paranoia that exists in some managements. But any company confident about its working conditions should have nothing to fear.

When I tried a few work-related words in the search filter of Facebook I came up with one or two revealing entries. A group focussing on Foxtons, the estate agents - “Foxtons is a great placed to work” - was largely complementary, including a few reassuring comments for some who are facing their fist day at work. The group, however, was formed in response to an earlier and slightly larger one called “Former Foxtons employees who are scarred by the experience.”

Some groups such as “30 things to do at Walmart” are little more than sources of juvenile amusement, in this case at the expense of the world’s largest superstore chain. Equally there is an “I love Walmart” group with more than 1,700 members and a “Boycott Walmart” group with nearly a thousand members. Reputationally, it seems that within the social networking arena, companies must learn to take the rough with the smooth.

McDonalds, as might be expected, has moved in to Facebook with a commercial presence, sponsoring the “McCareers” group advertising job openings at the company. But anyone who runs the word “McCareers” in to the Facebook group search engine will find that this too has its detractors.

The problem with special interest groups on Facebook – and the reason that company heads should not get too worried about them – is that there are so many of these groups and those that do exist are rarely a source for intelligent debate.

The biggest workplace issue raised by these sites is not about employer reputations or security fears that are usually overblown, but about time frittered away online in offices when people should be working for their employer.

Employers, however, have always worried about time wasting. It was debated in Management and the Worker, the 1939 account of Western Electric’s Chicago-based Hawthorne factory studies written by Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson. In their book they noted that in spite of a management-imposed work target – the so-called “bogey” - employees had their own ideas about what constituted a fair day’s work.

This is why managers need to think long and hard about what is reasonable when they set work expectations. Continually raising targets does little for morale and only creates resentment among hard-pressed employees.

It’s important to allow some slack in any working day. We all need opportunities to stare out of the window. Some of that time is spent thinking and some of that thinking is directed at our work. It’s good to take an interest in the work of individuals too. Managers need to spend to time with their teams ensuring that people understand how their contribution is making a difference. That has to be real time, not Royal time.

Great work teams worry about each other as much as any social network. In fact the best work teams are social networks in their own right where everyone works for each other in a kind of Musketeer ethic. You don’t see that on Facebook.

See also: Recruitment and social networking

and my blog article: Facebook to the rescue