Facebook & Twitter costing businesses billions… allegedly
Workers using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are supposedly costing companies billions of dollars each year. That is if you believe the latest survey on the subject to emerge from the U.K. The problem is the assumption that before social media came along workers were 100 percent productive, and compliant with the idea of business hours being purely for business. They weren’t, of course.
The majority of Web users will have an account on one or more social networks. They may have held out for a long while, but succumbed to the lure or peer pressure in the end. And most of them will use the sites on a regular basis.
With most of us working longer than ever these days, with a third of our lives spent in offices or work environments simply to earn a living wage, the addictiveness of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter can entice us to dabble even when we’re at work. How much of a problem that is, or could become in the future, is open to interpretation.
The Telegraph is reporting that the latest survey of 1,460 office workers in the U.K. suggests that each worker wastes an average of 40 minutes per week on social networks. If true, this could mean £1.38 billion ($2.25 billion) is being lost by the British economy each year. And other countries are likely to mirror or even exceed these estimates, so the figure could be astronomically high on a global scale.
However, this survey completely ignores the fact that social networks and Internet use have merely replaced other forms of worker interaction and time-wasting in the workplace. People may, in the past, have been more interested in talking about the sports results or soap opera plots from the night before. Or they may have sat doing the daily crossword or a sudoku, or even checking their email far too often.
Social networking isn’t in addition to these pastimes carried out at work but an extension or replacement for them. So the same amount of money is probably being lost now as it ever was. That doesn’t make it right for people to shun work in favor of tweeting but it does make this survey much less important than it may have otherwise seemed.
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