Though companies worldwide have been taking steps to ban the use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, researchers are now claiming that banning the popular sites might harm productivity and morale. As such, researchers are advising companies institute informed and appropriate usage policies that could theoretically improve the corporate workplace environment.

In a brief entitled, “Facing up to Facebook,” the Trade Union Congress of Great Britain argues that employees should not be denied access to their personal sides of life, and doing such could be detrimental to worker morale. “People obviously have only one real identity, and that has to cover them for both work life and personal life. Asking people to totally sacrifice a private life is unreasonable.”

Instead of banning usage of popular networking sites, the TUC advises companies to establish “reasonable conduct policy,” under which employers clearly state their expectations of employees both on and offline.

By doing so, employees will appreciate corporate willingness to meet them at a middle ground, and (ideally) will not abuse their privileges outside the parameters for legitimate Facebook and MySpace usage.

Not only that, the TUC’s report discourages companies from utilizing Facebook for recruitment purposes; utilizing the information people display on their personal profiles might breach the idea of equal opportunity as some individuals might appear better or worse than others.

Many companies have raised concerns regarding the security of social networking sites; they fear vital corporate information could be leaked by employee usage. In the same vein as their previous arguments, the TUC said that social networking sites should not be singled out as the only culprit for divulged information; any user could unwittingly disclose corporate information just by visiting sites that aren’t socially oriented.

The TUC finally advises employees to step up and deal with the issue instead of ignoring it; they argue that the employees of tomorrow consider social networking sites to be “the norm,” and avoidance will only aggravate the issue.

Assuredly all the youth (and elderly) of tomorrow can only benefit from the opinions of the TUC on Facebook and MySpace. Though the advice doesn’t bring up anything new (avoidance is never a solution to any problem), hopefully businesses can adapt and evolve in the socially-connected internet world of tomorrow; after all, why discourage employees from continuously refreshing their homepages in hopes of catching a new status update or pic when there is meaningless work to be done?

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 1:59 pm under Internet, Opinion, Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Triston McIntyre.
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