I hear questions like these a lot at conferences – How do I stop my employees from wasting time on Facebook? or What do I do with an employee who is spending too much time on Facebook? My responds is always the same – You don’t have a Facebook problem you have an employee problem. What would you do if that employee were spending too much time at the water cooler? Or on the phone with his girlfriend? Or playing solitaire all day? For some reason when people are presented with an old problem in a digital format they focus on the format and not the problem. Ask some important questions – is this employee getting their work done? If the answer is yes, well then you need to decide if you really have a problem or if you just a problem with Facebook. If they were spending time doing something else like chatting at the water cooler how would you feel? What if they were doing something less visible? Like emailing friends or playing solitaire or watching last nights episode of Lost or reading the news online? If the answer is no he is not getting his work done, then blocking Facebook won’t solve your problem.
Control is an Illusion You Need to Let Go
The issue of control comes up over and over again when we talk about the online world. It recently it came up at Internet Librarian in many different ways, including: How do I stop a staff member from wasting time on Facebook? How do we control what staff are saying online? Management wants everything posted online (Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc) to go through PR. We don’t want employees to be able to access social networking sites? What about privacy? We can’t allow just anyone to post a comment without approving it first. How do we know a student is who they say they are? I have answers to all of these questions, but these questions aren’t what this is about, what they represent is, control. Or the illusion of control. The desire for control comes from fear. Fear of change, of the unknown, of doing things differently, of a situation not created by us, of taking risks. It is human nature to fear these things, it’s how we’ve survived. So is adaptation and times are changing, just as they always do, and we need to adapt. In the internet age your image/brand no longer belongs to you. It belongs to
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