Must Every Business Really Ban Facebook?
There are always new trends, patterns and buzzwords on the internet. There are websites that make the news for all sorts of reasons. Everyone has heard of Google - that's where you go to find anything. Ebay - that's where you go to flog or buy anything. And recently we've all heard of sites like YouTube and MySpace.The latest site to hit the media spotlight with an explosion of coverage and articles is FaceBook, the social networking site extraordinaire. At first the preserve of university students in America and then around the world, when they allowed everyone to join, the flood gates really opened.
People of all ages have flocked to the site with its clean and intuitive navigation, multitude of applications and methods of communication and more importantly the ease with which you can be nosey and find out what everyone you used to know is up to now. You can address important questions - are you earning more than your former school friend? Did you go to a better university? And how is it they have 197 friends whilst they were fairly unpopular at school, yet you only have 37?
What is beyond dispute is that, for many people, Facebook is extremely addictive, and can happily absorb a couple of hours at a time. Now, the question is, does this mean that businesses should ban Facebook carte blance, adopting an 'Evil, not good' mantra towards the site?
Recent media reports would seem to say 'yes', with daily reports of more and more employers adding the site to their banned list. At first thought, this may seem the reasonable thing to do. After all, you pay your employees to work, to do things that benefit the company, and tracing their old friends and first loves on Facebook isn't going to help with that.
But can a counter-argument be made? Well, not every business has banned Facebook, and a list of reasons why allowing access to the site may actually be a good thing have been constructed along these lines:
- Allowing access shows that you trust and respect your employees to manage their time well. More contented staff work harder for you.
- It acknowledges that people have a life outside work and a range of different relationships. Allowing them to 'get away from their work' for a short while each day may be no bad thing.
- More and more people on Facebook are not simply students, but business owners, workers and senior employees. With common interest clubs, it may even be possible to do business on the site and represent the business in a good light.
- It is better to give everyone access and monitor their usage, then ban selectively the few who are over-using the site and their privileges rather than penalise the vast majority who would use the site responsibly.
- Staff feel good about themselves and their company when they realise how lucky they are to be allowed to access their site, whilst their friends elsewhere say 'I've been banned from it, we're not trusted to manage our time sensibly' - giving great kudos to the enlightened employer too.
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