Is Social Media a Time-Waster at Your Office?
Source: ConvergenceCoaching, LLC Inspired Ideas
The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog entry by Michelle Baca.
People are concerned that by embracing social media as part of their firm's strategy, they will be encouraging their team members to spend too much time on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
But, as Tom Hood suggests in a short video entitled “Keeping Up With Change,” if you are going to cut off team members' ability to interact on social networking sites, then you better be “cracking down” on other time wasting activities such as conducting personal phone calls, playing with smart phones, chatting around the water cooler, etc.
Tom points out that if you have an issue with team members wasting time on social media, then what you have is a management problem, not a social media problem, and I agree!
In a few years there will be countless new ways to waste time. You can't eliminate them all. But you can:
- Set performance expectations so that team members are focused on producing results and meeting their performance and production goals.
- Establish a simple social media policy to ensure that everyone knows what is considered appropriate business use of social media. Here is a link to a list of sample social media policies: http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php. I suggest that you aim for a very simple policy and encourage your people to use common sense. For example: don't post anything with any religious, sexual or political undertones; don't use profanity and don't post anything you wouldn't want your boss or your grandmother to read.
- Address time-wasting in any form by engaging in timely performance management.
For the complete article, read “Are You Guilty of Setting a Social Media Double-Standard?”
From Convergence Coaching, LLC Inspired Ideas, http://blog.convergencecoaching.com, January 26, 2011.