Does your Business Ban Access to Facebook & other Social Networks? 

Do you let your business users have unrestricted access to the Internet and social networks during the working day? Do you know if they are spending their time surfing the ‘net or on Facebook, or any of the other social networking sites, when they should be working?

Why would you ban Facebook and Social Networks at work?

This is a difficult business decision, get it wrong and you either; loose the trust and respect of your employees or have your employees spending too much time on the Internet during the working day. Some of this will depend on what your business does and whether the information from the social networking sites is relevant to the way that you do business, take a look at our blog on Xobni and social networking.

Really you have a couple of choices:-

1. Ban access to social networks altogether during business hours.
2. Only allow access to social networks during lunch hour.
3. Allow your employees unrestricted access to social networks, but monitor the usage. 

Option 1 is going to alienate a lot of people and human nature says that people will find other ways of accessing social networks, such as using mobile phones etc. So this is probably a self defeating policy.

Option 2 may work but you then need to know when everyone is going to be on a break and have to implement a service which will allow you to give different users access to different sites at different times of day. This will probably be complex to manage and will cost some money to implement.

Option 3 is the most sensible approach, however if you are going to monitor your employees usage of the Internet you need to tell your employees in advance. Form a legal perspective and good HR practice point of view you will need an ‘Acceptable Usage’ Policy that states when they can use social networking and what is excessive usage and you will need to inform your employees that the company is monitoring Internet usage.

So should you ban access to facebook and other social networks?

In most businesses there is no practical value in banning access to social networks.

If you must do something than option 3 is really the best way, can be implemented at very little cost and is a good compromise. It shows that you are a reasonable employer, that you allow your employees flexibility, but also that you are keeping an eye on overall usage of social networks and will intervene should people start to take advantage.

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