One of the recurrent questions or issues that surfaces in conversations about social media and the workplace be it in a school, corporation, or governmental organization is whether or not social media undermines productivity. Here is a post from one of the researchers at the Social Media Collective (part of Microsoft Research New England) who shares a report on the consequences of banning these sorts of technologies.
… we’re starting to understand the very premise – that social media usage inhibits productivity – is a myth. A forthcoming, two-year longitudinal study titled Exploring social network interactions in enterprise systems: the role of virtual co-presence by Nandhakumar, Baptista, and Subramaniam, of Warwick Business School, found that using social media at work could actually enhance workers’ productivity.
What’s your take on this? What kind of social media policies do you have in place at your school or workplace? Did that policy incorporate existing research on social media usage?
Image courtesy Creative Commons license and Flickr user Dennis Matheson
I found the part about working away from the office interesting. I always tell my students to feel free to email me at night and weekends and I usually get back to them fairly quickly. So, because of this, if I end up on goggle chat with my husband working on carpooling details at work, I don’t find that a problem. I have very little work/personal life separation, I guess, because my husband and I teach at the same college! I have also used social media to communicate with my colleagues, and it often saves time over walking to someone’s office or scheduling a meeting.