Facebook and Twitter – Should they be blocked in office !

A vociferous NO!!

There are numerous times when we see the page shown below (or something similar telling us that its against organizational policy) in our offices when we try to login to Facebook, Twitter or any of the other social networking websites.

The traditional arguments supporting the blocking of these pages have been:


i) Employees will waste time on these rather than doing actual work – My take on this is that employees are an innovative lot. If they HAVE to waste time, they will find numerous ways to do it. The analogy to this could be that you do not provide telephones at workstations because employees might call up their friends during the day and waste time!!!


ii) Employees might leak confidential information – First of all, employees are not stupid and they understand that this will not be taken lightly by senior management. So they will be extra careful. And if you really have an employee doing this deliberately, then he really has no business being part of the organization in the first place.


Even if organizations keep banning these websites, smart-phones are an obvious option that the employee has to access them 24x7. Smart-phones have penetrated deep into the Millennial and the Gen Y population and are no more restricted to the corporate boys, as signified by the new Vodafone-Blackberry ad.


From the business point of view, I will take the example of 2 types of organizations to push my case for NOT banning social networking websites and how these could help in the long run:

• Service based Organizations – It is critical that these types of organizations keep an open ear to what is being said about them in the marketplace. And Facebook is the biggest marketplace in the world today. Last heard, if Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd biggest in the world. So that’s the size we are talking about. Consumers who thrive on sharing information are on the rise and they do not hesitate to put real time feedback on Twitter for ex.,
• “Having Cappuccino at XYZ Coffe Place..the service sucks!
• “The new XYZ mobile service rocks!....Just had a smooth conversation in a lift 3 levels below the ground floor ”

One can imagine the kind of impact these simple tweets can have on the group of people listening to this conversation on the web.

• Sales based Organizations – With social networking websites garnering huge membership figures, it is essential that the conversations in these maintain a positive note. Any negative discord has to be handled quickly and efficiently. These websites have taken word-of-mouth publicity to levels never ever imagined a few years back.
  
  
  
  
  
  Just imagine if a marketer was listening to the natural conversation above…

And users consider this publicity GENUINE, simply because it is coming from people they know and it is taking natural conversations onto the cyber space. Apart from the genuineness, marketers can use these to increase visibility as well as get on-the-spot feedback on what people think about new schemes/ launches / products, etc.


In effect, what I am trying to say is that these websites can actually add value to the business. And my belief is that the HR function’s role is complete only when it can help in adding value to the business.


So we need to come out of the old mindset and start exposing employees and our marketers to this ongoing revolution and modify our policies to accept these changes. The insightful Dilbert sums up my discussion:

Listening to Employees

In continuation of my post on retention of employees, I got some queries on what to do when we conduct Stay Interviews…

While Exit Interviews have been a traditional tool for trying to understand the issues employees face, the general feeling is that almost always, it is too late. We have all heard of employees saying:

‘What is the point of these questions now?’

‘Why couldn’t these questions be asked earlier?’

and even worse !!

‘Why did the organization not do anything when I had raised this earlier?’

In a country like India where almost all organizations are grappling with the issue of retention of quality talent, these are interesting questions. They tell us that the employee is waiting to be heard. He is willing to give the organization a chance. However, if the issues faced by him are not sorted out, he will not hesitate to move on.

For this, we need to understand from the employees the key imperatives that help him stay in the organization. Stay Interviews can be used as a forum where we focus on the +ve, we focus on why employees would want to stick with the organization ‘in spite of’ the constraints he faces.

Stay Interviews can give us interesting insights into the employee mindset thereby assisting in 2 key elements of the HR loop.

i) Engagement

ii) Development

Engagement – Stay Interviews will give us interesting insights into how our key employees think, thereby, giving us an early warning mechanism for identifying employees likely to leave. Our engagement initiatives can then be centered on critical employees (who are likely to leave and whose skills are pivotal in the organization)

Development – Stay Interviews throw up a lot of areas where the organization needs to improve as well as employees coming up with areas where they would want to improve in order to move on to the next level in the organization.

However, a word of caution around Stay Interviews: While employees understand and admit that changes cannot be made overnight, if they do not see a sustained effort towards change, they will start thinking of the whole exercise as hogwash. Hence, one needs to be very careful and take care of employee expectations. Any organization should venture into this exercise only when there is a clear mandate and effort towards making a difference.