Facebook at work isn’t an either/or proposition
For days, department members had ignored emails from a colleague asking for their input on a business matter. This was no overt act of rebellion against the sender of the email. In fact, she was well-liked. Instead, the request got lost in the avalanche of email employees received, or it represented yet another to-do added to an already-daunting list, or they did not spend their days at desks with computers, checking email at common workstations only infrequently.
None of which diminished the sender’s need to get replies. So at home that evening, she sent the same request again, but this time from her Facebook account to the Facebook accounts of those employees she was trying to reach. Remember, she was well-liked and had been friended by many of her colleagues, every one of whom responded, from home, to her work-related query.
This is not an isolated case. I’ve heard the story three times, from employees in three different companies. In one of those organizations, the employees in question belonged to a union; leadership had dismissed the ability to engage them after hours through social channels because their contract explicitly exempted them from off-hours work. They were flumoxed to learn that they had, in fact, taken non-work time to provide a work-related answer to a colleague. It was even more perplexing to grasp the idea that they would reply from home to a Facebook query when they hadn’t replied during work hours to a company email.
It’s a phenomenon of the networked age. It’s easy to prioritize emails that flood your inbox, but there’s a desire to respond when a friend reaches out to you on a network to which you both belong. It’s another example of the intermingling of employees’ work lives and their lives away from work. People used to keep these dimensions of their lives separate, mostly because you interacted with your work colleagues at work and your friends and family at home. Those distinctions are rapidly evaporating when you add your work friends to your social networks; they all become part of a single relationship pool.
Not that your colleagues were ever confined to a work role. The best boss I ever had—Ed Hahn, who directed Organization Development at Mattel—made it clear: You’re only work colleagues until you get to know each other. After that, you’re friends, acquaintances, or enemies. Work, Ed said, is social.
That’s why employees band together in Facebook groups like the UIHC emergency room staff, or the employees of Siemens Egypt. What Facebook, Twitter, and other social tools have changed is the ability to engage with the people you know outside the physical boundaries that used to restrict your ability to interact. As a result, companies are struggling with the notion of the eight-hour workday when employees are able—and willing—to work just about any time, any place.
If you’re familiar with Gallup’s employee engagement survey, you know that a key question has to do with whether you have any friends at work. Social networks support work-based friendships and thus contribute to building engagement. Companies with large populations of highly engaged employees produce stronger growth than those whose employees are not so engaged.
Because the use of social networks at work is not a simple black-and-white concept—they’re not either exclusively working or exclusively screwing around—companies need to rethink their bans on employee use of social networks at work. It’s simply wrong to assume that employees connecting with friends on Facebook aren’t producing any value for the organization, since their interactions can produce direct work-related results (like the employees who got answers from colleagues they couldn’t get through official channels), insights, and even high-quality candidates for open positions in the company.
Companies that embrace the idea of a networked workforce will recognize that employees connect with one another whenever it makes sense, not just from 9 to 5, using the tools they use to connect to everyone else. These companies will adopt policies that address the biggest risks associated with employees using social channels while giving the company the best chance to be more innovative, more productive, and more profitable.
11/30/09 | 9 Comments | Facebook at work isn’t an either/or proposition