90% of Managers Want Social Networks to Be Banned or Restricted

I know that there are some lucky people that have managed to persuade their bosses that social networking can actually be beneficial for their work and can enhance the overall web presence of the company they work in. What’s more, there are some lucky people (me included) who can actually engage in various activities on social networking websites and this is considered to be work for them.

But the number of such people is definitely very limited while the number of bosses who are unhappy about their employees accessing social networks is impressive: according to the latest survey, as many as 90% of all the managers in the UK want social networks to be banned – or at least access to the websites should be restricted. Here is the distribution of opinions on what should be done with access to social networking websites on the workplace:

The survey was carried out by Bloxx, the company that specializes in web content filtering – so the interest in social networking in the office is pretty obvious. But I guess no matter who initiates a similar survey (even Facebook itself), it will be pretty difficult to prove social networking at the workplace does not influence the three major aspects that managers are concerned about: productivity, security, and company reputation. Bandwidth was another concern though it is not really too much of an issue for companies with unlimited bandwidth plans.

The interesting fact is that while IT managers realize that their employees do spend some extra time on social networking websites, not many companies actually have any procedures in place that could prevent such things. For example, 35% of all IT managers believe that employees of their companies spend more than 30 minutes daily on social networks without any proper work-related reasons. And while this may not sound like too much time, it also means that a company that does not do anything about it (over 22% of all the respondents), provides employees with extra 16 days of paid vacations annually which is pretty impressive if you think of it.

Of course it is obvious that there are some categories of users that should be granted access to social networks for some work-related purposes with dedicated policies in place for everyone to follow and observe. But all in all, I don’t really think it’s fair to socialize on your employer’s time if the employer does not expect you to work extra unpaid hours on your personal time – which could probably be something of an excuse.