Over the past few months I’ve come across a number of interesting, yet conflicting, views regarding the benefits associated with allowing the use of Social Media tools in the workplace.
A media release published by the University of Melbourne in April 2009 claims that “‘workers who engage in Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t”. The author of the study, Dr. Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing further says that “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.”
This survey is in direct support of an earlier study conducted by Accenture that makes the observation that people who were born between 1977 and 1997 (corresponding roughly with Generation Y) expect their employers to respect their IT preferences, including their computers and applications and that employees in the above age group would show a preference to use instant messaging, text messaging, and RSS feeds to communicate with their clients and customers. The study further found that over a quarter of the employees surveyed use technology that is unsupported and unsanctioned by their employer. Amongst Gen Y employees, almost half reported that they use social networks, blogs, vlogs, or Twitter without having their IT departments’ approval.
A new study, published by Helen Hodgetts of the University of Cardiff in the UK found that “Email notifications and instant messages all cause a break in focus of the task in hand, even if they are attended to only very briefly”.
It seems like the jury is still out on this question. The topic of applying effective time management to managing e-mail has already been discussed extensively with most experts making the observation that effective use of e-mail requires the allocation of pre-defined time-slots throughout the day for checking and sorting out e-mail. Accordingly e-mail notification should be turned off as, as outlined above, they cause a break in focus and take attention from other productive and planned activities.
It is not difficult to see how social media tools will fall into the same category as e-mail notifications. The majority of these tools (take twitter for example) are based on random stream of uncontrolled and unscheduled data. Unlike e-mail notification that can be assumed (although not necessarily so) to be work related, social media traffic will be (mostly) not work related and has the potential to lead to substantial amount of lost time.
It is easy to see why Gen Y employees will be keen to maintain their internet access while they’re at work. This is the generation mostly associated with the ‘dot.com’ concept and are also (perhaps fondly) called ‘dot.com generation’.
I’ve yet to see a study which addresses the apparent conflict between the wishes and desires of this generation and the realization that some of their surfing habits are not necessarily conducive to an effective and productive working environment.
So, watch this space.
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Pingback: Shim Marom
Interesting post Shim. I referenced a Stanford study in a post I did a while back that contradicts the first one you cited and agrees with the third.
Do Your Project Teams Suffer From Chronic Media Multitasking?
The reporting on that Melbourne study seems to be lacking. There are no details about how they measured the data and what the controls were. Why no link to the abstract and/or study itself? My first reaction is that Dr. Coker seems to making leaps in his interpretation (after listening to the audio interview). There seem to be a lot of assumptions they are making.
Another important distinction is that the Stanford study was carried out by scientists, and the Melbourne study occurred with management & marketing people. From what I can find so far, especially with the lack of any protocol description from Melbourne, my confidence in the Melbourne study is lacking.
Josh Nankivel
pmStudent.com
Thanks Shim. I also sent the authors an email requesting more information.
I’m curious about things like whether this was self-report data or not, how productivity was defined and measured, controlling for things like the Hawthorne effect, double-blinding, etc.
Pingback: Shim Marom
Thanks Josh. Agree with your comments. I had the same concerns regarding the method used to arrive at the Melbourne University Study’s conclusions. I have contacted the university and asked to get a copy of the full study. Having waited for awhile and not getting any response I decided to go ahead and publish my post but if I ever get a reply I will post an update. I suspect, like you, that the results were driven by subjective interpretation and not based on objective measurements.
Cheers,
Shim.