November 2007 - Office work and social deprivation on the internet

About six years ago I embarked on a book project with two collaborators on the importance of networks in the future of work. I wrote an introduction and a chapter, then waited …and waited.

The collaboration died; a pity because we had some good material, including stories about early communications networks in Roman times, the road networks of the Incas and various intelligence networks, both ancient and modern.

The time seemed right. The initial internet-inspired investment euphoria had disappeared and there was not much sign of what would come to be known as Web 2.0 technology or any discussion of long tail distribution graphs that were still confined to statistics text books.

Interest in networks was spreading, however, as work-related networking groups such as First Tuesday began to grow in popularity and books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point were beginning to investigate the workings of networks. The internet had stimulated a thirst for sharing information very similar to that which occurred during the Enlightenment when thinkers and scientists exchanged letters through European academies and societies.

I can trace my interest in networks back to a column in 1998 inspired by a meeting with Karen Stephenson, an anthropologist, who specialised in studying the social dynamics of communications and how they applied in the workplace.

She was fascinated by the way information was distributed among groups of people on what she called “invisible lines of trust”. The most interesting people in these lines of communication she described as “pulse takers,” what Gladwell called “mavens.”

Mavens are the people in offices or pubs who seem to know everything. They are the ones with their ears to the ground. They are not usually the bosses (who might well know things but are bound by confidentiality obligations).

Mavens do not know all the answers, but they know where to find snippets of information and where they can go to test their theories. Sometimes their “news” is no more than an educated guess but, for those who rely on them, they become a trusted source. People not only seek information from them but also pass on to them their own titbits.

I had seen the way this worked in a newsroom which had also benefited from an early electronic message system that allowed the creation of special-interest “user groups.” In this way, long before the email, or social networking websites, journalists had been exchanging vital screen-based messages such as: “Fancy a pint?”

So there is nothing really very new about social networking. Nor is there anything new in the fears that this kind of thing can be disruptive to the working environment. In the 1930s typing pool supervisors were constantly complaining about what they regarded as distracting levels of gossip among their office workers.

Today the complaint is levelled at internet-based social networking. The worry is well founded. Various studies have been published recently arguing that internet-based social networking in offices is wasting business time. Whether or not you subscribe to the dodgy statistics presented in these studies, it’s difficult to deny that there must be a significant cost to business in lost hours.

A recruitment company head told me a week ago he had banned access to the Facebook web site in his office. “I noticed that the people who seemed to be on there all the time were the ones that were the least productive. The most productive people didn’t go there much in work time,” he said.

In this respect I would say there are three categories of office workers: those who just get on with their work and don’t take much interest in internet-based exchanges. Those who enjoy looking in to their web pages during breaks and slack periods and, finally, those who become addicted to the technology and can’t help popping on to these sites at every possible opportunity.

The first two groups are not a great problem for managers. It is the third group – usually comprising people who find little intrinsic stimulation in office work - that poses the biggest problem. But this group has always existed. It exists in school classrooms, offices and on factory floors.

Ironically it’s among such groups that you can sometimes find the entrepreneurs, the artists and the dreamers. But that doesn’t help when work consists of repetitive administrative tasks.

I’m not seeking to disparage this kind of work, or to defend the fickleness of dreamers. Everyone, be they artist or entrepreneur, must knuckle down to shifting work at some stage and most people understand this.

There are individuals, however, who simply do not thrive in routines. Perhaps they should be sifted out by those who recruit for routine work. But the workplace would be pretty dull without them.

Depriving easily distracted individuals of external stimulation may be the only way to suppress their mercurial instincts long enough to focus their talents on the job in hand.

But it cannot be a long term solution. Firstly, many people are learning to bypass attempts to block access to certain sites. My schoolboy son was explaining to me this past weekend how he achieves this in his classroom. I didn’t know whether to be angry or proud. Monitoring or blocking simply drives internet usage underground creating what a recent McDonalds study described as a “generation of sneaky surfers.”

Secondly, social networking is a phenomenon that is not going away. As the initial excitement dies its use will become routine. I noticed this week that newspaper accounts reporting the deaths of four fire fighters at the Atherston warehouse fire in Warwickshire, had drawn biographical details from Facebook entries.

Photographs of the dead fire fighters were being compiled on a Facebook group and friends were visiting the site of one of the firemen to pay their condolences. Socially this is comparable with the in-memoriam columns in newspapers. Disseminating information in this way is important.

The full disaster of the battle of the Somme in 1916 was not revealed by the government of the day but in the long columns of deaths recorded publicly by families in British newspapers.

Here is the real issue of social networking for business. Its potency has taken companies by surprise. Many bosses, initially dismissive of these sites, now feel threatened, partly because they worry that their workplaces are being undermined and partly because they feel they must exclude themselves for fear that their presence in a network will be unwelcome.

Often these are people who rely on their position and job title as a measure of their authority. Not unreasonably they feel they must preserve some distance from staff they may have to discipline, promote or make redundant at some stage. But reporting lines count for nothing on the internet.

Just as any social arena – the home, the workplace, the street – becomes a stage for human interaction, so does the internet network. Yes, there are threats but there are opportunities too. If parents can communicate with their children overseas on a daily basis, playing on-line word games or posting pictures, colleagues can interact in similarly innovative ways and that can’t be a bad thing. We all need to learn how to use this thing sensibly. Education and debate may prove a more positive route than censure.

See also: Office networks

Read more of my articles about Networks