Mayor of a Ukrainian Town Forbids His Subordinates To Use Social Networks During Working Hours

Mayor of a small town in Ukraine has forbidden his subordinates from spending time on one of the most popular social networks in the Russian-speaking segment of the internet, Odnoklassniki.ru. The mayor claimed that he had noticed facts of his subordinates spending time on the social network and exchanging private messages with their friends and even with their colleagues sitting in the neighboring room - all during normal working hours.

From now on the mayor demands that everyone in his office stops visiting Odnoklassniki.ru during office hours same as he now does: after journalists started questioning his own activities on the social network and the time he spent over there he decided to stop using it himself - and use it as a good example for his subordinates as well.

The irony here is that the mayor is not actually concerned about the decrease in efficiency of the civil servants in his town and about the fact that they waste time the taxpayers happen to pay them for. What he is actually concerned about is the fact that visitors can notice improper websites running in the browsers on their displays and will start asking questions.

To me it looks like social networks are growing into a huge problem here in Russia and in the former USSR countries like Ukraine - we are all fascinated with social networks to the extent that it represents a real danger to work in many cases. In fact, as many as 69% of Russian companies already block access to social networks from office computers which seems to be the only option to make employees stop wasting time the employers pay for on social networks.

But officially admitting that public officers waste the money of their taxpayers on the social networks and only asking them to stop this behavior - without any measures like blocking the network or beginning to track their internet activities - sounds like a little too much. After all, the civil officers working in the countries of the former Soviet Union are well known not to be the most efficient officers in the world and I’d really not want them to be even less efficient by spending their time chatting on social networks.

Via (in Russian)