Will You Quit Your Job for Facebook?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 6th, 2008 9:00 AMA recent study by Vnunet found that “nearly a third of younger employees would consider quitting their job if Facebook was banned in the workplace.” The lesson? Don’t expect your employees to be working otherwise they will quit on you. While you are at it, throw in the television and give them a break every 30 minutes. Seriously though, younger employees feel as though they should have total access to the internet. As a member of Generation Y I can confirm the feeling.
I previously worked at a job where they blocked access to most sites and it created a fair amount of stress. I didn’t think that taking a look at Facebook or the news was really that big a time waster but the people I worked for did. I didn’t last long at the job but I don’t think that lack of access to Facebook was the problem. According to the article, another survey “by IT services firm Telindus found that 39 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access applications like Facebook and YouTube.”
This is a high number of individuals that feel it’s their right to have access to these things at work. It shows just how far we have come. Then again, I remember when not being granted access to a radio while working would have been torture. Perhaps social networks are the modern radio? I’ve argued that social networks would become the next television but when was the last time that you were allowed to regularly watch television during work hours?
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Not only its not possible for rumours and other things to spread in the office, i'm a bit more productive.
Still it is frustrating to organize or find out about events until after work.
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and thought you meant "will you quit your job to go and work for facebook?"
Guess I would.
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To be fair, Facebook is a ways down my personal priority list: IM and LJ matter more to me. But the basic principle is that it's a dumb policy. A smart company knows that employees need to chill and communicate a bit during the workday. If that interferes with getting their jobs done then they should be canned, but so long as it's kept within reasonable bounds it helps people have lives, and not resent work so much.
Internet restrictions really only make sense if you view your employees as dumb identikit drones. But if that's your attitude, I don't want to be anywhere *near* your company...
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Besides, there are ways to circumvent the blocks and restrictions.
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To note : I work in a software development company in mauritius and we are in the web 2.0 era!
wat a paradox!
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