According to Telegraph, employers in the United Kingdom are planning to introduce a new rule, which limits on the amount of time office workers spend on the world’s most popular social networking website – Facebook. The main reason is that employees are spending too much of their time at work on maintaining their social lives instead of focusing on what they should be doing during office hours.
Most offices in Britain will start implementing this new rule of allowing workers to have a ‘Facebook break’ of just 10 minutes a day. Well, is this measure feasible or not? According to a study by information security consultancy Global Secure Systems and the organizers of the Infosecurity Europe trade show, the use of such sites is costing U.K. business an estimated $12.5 billion per year in terms of reduced output. Another study showed that employees spend at least 30 minutes a day visiting these sites with some employees spending up to three hours of their working day taking care of their online profile.
In contrast, an Australian study in April this year stating that as many as 9% workers who indulge in such activity have better productivity than those who don’t. The study involved 300 workers and 70% of those engaged in workplace Internet leisure browsing.
Standing from a student’s perspective, my school forbids students from bringing mobile phones to school, not only because of the tendency of SMS-ing and playing mobile games during lessons, but also due to the distraction social websites such as Facebook and Twitter bring about. Similarly, if employees have an incessant habit of logging in to Facebook, especially when they are half-way through of composing a proposal, most probably it will either result in the delay of submission or even a poor quality work.
However, some may complain that the 10-minute Facebook break is simply not enough. We spend hours a day sharing photos, videos, news and gossip with friends on social websites. But when we reach home after work, there’s not much time left to surf the net as interacting with their family members (be it having a dinner or watching television programmes together) is definitely more crucial. That is why ‘Facebooking’ while at work seems to be the only period of the day that we could maintain their social profiles.
Besides imposing a limit on the amount of time employees spend on social websites, some bosses have resorted to more extreme measures. For example, block all Internet connectivity, restrict access to certain websites or ban the use of mobile devices, lest workers may still surf Facebook on their iPhones.