54% of Employers Don’t Understand Social Networking
I’ve been a proponent of social networking and media sites almost since they came of age earlier this decade. Early sites such as Friendster hardly made a dent in our collective consciousness but MySpace and then Facebook blew the lid wide open and now we have LinkedIn and Twitter being used as common household words. Thank goodness. People are finally understanding that their relationships need not be face-to-face like they were in the 1800’s but they can be more than that. They can be real and tight yet across many miles and even continents. So if regular people get that, why don’t most employers?
Our friends at Robert Half International recently surveyed employers and found that 54 percent ban social networking from the workplace even if the networking is directly related to the work assigned to the employee. Some employers who read this blog article may argue that people should not be doing anything at work unless it is work-related. Yet I bet that most and probably virtually all of those employers have no problem providing their employees with plane tickets which require travel on evenings and weekends, BlackBerry and other PDA’s so those employees can stay in touch on evenings and weekends, and even phone meetings when employees are out sick. In short, employers are asking their employees to walk the walk but those employers aren’t even talking the talk.
Aside from the obvious hypocrisy of rewarding and sometimes even requiring employees to work during personal hours while prohibiting those same employees from doing personal tasks during work hours, those employers are really doing themselves far more long-term damage than they probably realize.
Put yourself in the shoes of an employee who is prohibited from using even a professional networking site like LinkedIn during work hours. What your employer is telling you is that they don’t trust you. They don’t trust you to get your work done. They don’t trust you to put in enough hours. They don’t trust the content that you may post on-line. They simply don’t trust you. Now fast forward a year or two. The economy is strong again and that employee is ready to advance their career. They’re considering looking for a promotion within your organization but also prepared to make a move to a competitor. The competitor trusts its employees and so allows them to use social media while on the job. They have policies in place to provide guidance to their employees but there is trust flowing from the employer to its employees. How likely do you think it is that you’ll be able to retain that employee? If you’re honest, the likelihood is probably a lot less than 54 percent.
