Twitter cost London firms £325M a year but you can still have a cigarette break

On my way to a meeting this afternoon, I was reading the free newspaper Evening Standard and noticed this article on why Twitter seems to cost millions of pounds to London firms because of lost productivity with their staff.

Apparently London firms are banning Twitter and other social networking sites because they cost almost £325M a year in lost productivity. Some survey conducted by the IT consulting firm Morse claims that 59% of office workers admit to use Twitter spending an average of 59 minutes a week reading and sending tweets.

The press release from Morse is making the case even more alarming where they say the loss of productivity among all social networking sites reaches £1.38B a year if you take into consideration the danger of phishing scams and all security issues whilst clicking on URL shorteners with no guarantee it will leads you to the right website you thought you were going to.

I am bit surprised to see journalists like Mark Prigg still swallowing all these nonsense surveys without any sort of judgment about whether they are really making a valid case. How can you blame fantastic tools like Twitter or Facebook - that literally transform the way we communicate in the 21st century world - to be responsible for the lost of productivity with people.

Are we also asking workers to be 100% dedicated to their job 8 hours a day from 9 to 6 and forbid for:

1. picking a personal phone call  Answer ==> NO

2. receiving and responding to personal emails ==> NO

3. having a cigarette break ==> NO

4. taking a coffee break with a round of teas and coffees to make ==> NO

5. having social conversations with your colleagues "how was your weekend?" ==> NO

The list could go on...

The whole point I make here is in a typical day any workers would do something that is outside his or her job description. These little things like having cigarette breaks don't really bring any productivity to the company either but it's fine to allow them - some might even say it takes the whole stress out...

So let's cut the bullshit here. If your employees waste endless hours on Twitter and Facebook and other social networking sites, it is not the fault of Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Williams but maybe it is the fault of how you are communicating with your staff.

If people gets responsible, they would not abuse your openness to allowing them to use Twitter. Make sure you tell them that you trust them. If you can't trust your staff, maybe you should re look at your HR department and see whether you have recruited the right team for your businesses.

Here's my bet...By 2010, I am sure big corporate companies will be more relax about these sites but would have put in place a new code of conduct with their employees (you know that piece of document that is hidden in the intranet and just passed 5 years old of age).

My other bet (more risky should you say) is that in 2010, employers will gain more candidates from the new generation of workers (late teens and twenties) if they openly say they allow access to social networking sites.

Comments

[Petrecea Jakson]

Thanks the post It will clear the meths about social networking sites.These sites actually help to increase business productivity if used in proper way .And business owners like Travel operators, hotel owners and small business owners it work wonders.
For one of my site http://www.directtraveller.com/ these social networking are great source of income.

[david]

Yes,can such sites to increase their profits through advertising,thanks for post.

[hotels near disney world florida]

If used correctlt twitter can make a cmpany money. Cigarettes though not so much