I’ve been intrigued, since launching this site, by the inordinate number of comments left by high school students. After all, the Stop Blocking initiative is aimed at business, not academia. But Voce Communications’ Doug Haslam pointed me to a notice that Newton North High School — close to Doug’s Boston home — is considering shutting down student access to Facebook.
This is being debated at SFA (Student Faculty Administration). Your input will help SFA decide. The next meeting is April 13th @ 7:00am in the library. It is open for all students and staff to attend. (Note: Facebook is currently blocked at all Newton Public Schools.)
A poll included with the item currently stands at 370 votes against blocking and 87 in favor. The cynic in me suspects it was mostly students casting the opposing votes and parents voting yes.
The comments left to the item on the Wicked Local blog that directed me to the Learning Commons site, however, got me thinking more about the issue. The impetus behind the ban is at least partly based on the worry that kids use Facebook to bully others. One comment, for example, reads…
I am a private tutor in Newton. Just this year, I have had 3 Newton students (2 from North, 1 from South) who have been involved with the Newton police due to cyberbullying via Facebook. I am not sure what the outcome was, but I know for a fact that there were threats and there was police involvement.
Bullying is a problem, to be sure. It was a problem when I was in school, and when my parents were in school. The recent case in South Hadley, Massachusetts — in which nine teens were indicted for their roles in relentlessly bullying a 15-year-old girl who was driven to kill herself — is another tragedy that points to a serious need for action.
But blaming the Internet or Facebook is a mistake. In fact, I don’t care for the term “cyberbullying.” Is bullying that takes place over the phone called “phonebullying?” The venue is irrelevant. The channel isn’t the problem. The problem is the attitude that some kids have that bullying is okay wherever they can engage in it.
The situation reminds me of hospital CEO Paul Levy’s reaction when he learned that another hospital in the area was blocking Facebook because some staff members had violated HIPAA — the regulation that protects patient privacy — on Facebook. Levy, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (also in Boston), wrote on his “Running a Hospital” blog:
Any form of communication (even conversations in the elevator!) can violate important privacy rules, but limiting people’s access to social media in the workplace will mainly inhibit the growth of community and discourage useful information sharing. It also creates a generational gap, in that Facebook, in particular, is often the medium of choice for people of a certain age. I often get many useful suggestions from staff in their 20′s and 30′s who tend not to use email. Finally, consider the cost of building and using tools that attempt to “track utilization and monitor content.” Not worth the effort, I say.
Interestingly, the use of Facebook under consideration at Newton North involves a portal for parents, where they could view information relevant to their childrens’ education, including homework and projects.
I see multiple problems, though, with blocking kids’ access. First, many of them — like their counterparts in the business world — don’t need the school’s computers to access Facebook; they can do that just fine on their mobile phones. Lack of access from school won’t stop cyberbullying, either; they’ll just do it when they get home to their own computers.
But what’s really at issue is starting to teach using the channels that kids are already using in a manner that reflects the way peopale will be working and learning with increasing frequency. Collaborating on team projects makes more sense on Facebook than a proprietary school system because Facebook is (for now) the network they’ll continue to use in college and then in the work world. (A recent study (PDF file) from the Society for New Communication Research (SNCR) determined that decision-makers in the business world are making faster and better decisions by tapping their Social Media Peer Groups (SMPGs) via Facebook and LinkedIn. Failing to guide students in the use of the resources they’ll be required to use just to get their jobs done by the time they graduate is a failure of the education system.
I’m not talking about unrestricted Facebook use while students should be focused on schoolwork. But teachers need to begin figuring out how to incorporate social networking into their teaching plans in order for the coursework to be truly relevant. The idea that people work in isolation is fast becoming outdated, as the SNCR study reveals; teaching kids to do schoolwork in a vacuum is not preparing them for the processes they’ll need to understand when they go to college (where online collaboration is just the extension of the age-old study group) and then when they enter the world of work.
That is, teachers should be teaching the ways social neteworks can benefit their learning while actively discouraging bullying of any kind. The issues are, in fact, mutually exclusive.
Doug Haslam himself gets the final word, from a comment he left to the Wicked Local blog:
The thing is, people will form their own groups where they want regardless of what is “blocked.” It makes sense for schools to have some presence on Facebook — not to supervise or watch, but to participate as part of a community.
A proprietary network makes sense as far as assignments, but experimenting — as class groups, in the right circumstances — with Facebook and other social tools is a way to tap into how people are now working together in the real world.
That doesn’t mean students should be using Facebook during school hours to play Farmville, just as it shouldn’t in the workplace (where, for the most part, Facebook should not be blocked either. But, there are some applications. As someone astutely said (in an earlier comment), high school kids are on Facebook anyway. Maybe we should teach them how to use it to be better community citizens (online and off) rather than ignore it at our peril.
We have users that repeatedly get infected with viruses and spyware no matter what level or type of antivirus and antispyware software we install. It’s rather odd that ONLY THOSE particular users get re-infected day after day and that they all have MySpace accounts, FaceBook accounts, or whatever. Their employers have to continually pay us to come and clean these infections.
My reply was a bit terse. I asked Jones if he believed all the companies that don’t block access were lying about not encountering the problems he cited. (And no, I wasn’t snarky enough to point out that “outdated” is one word.)
The security issue does, however, appear to be supplanting productivity concerns as the main reason companies block access to Facebook and other social media sites. Among the dominant social networks, Facebook presents the biggest risk to company security, according to 60% of the respondents to a survey of 500 companies conducted by Sophos, an IT security organization. No other network comes close. MySpace ranks second, with 18% of companies identifying it as a concern, followed by Twitter (17%) and LinkedIn (4%).
The concerns are not illegitimate. The incidents of reported malware and spam attacks through social networks has jumped 70% since April of last year. Social networks have become common launching pads fore a couple of particularly nasty worms. The risk of infection, though, is not the only security issue that keeps IT staff up at night. Employees’ individual behavior represents a risk, particularly as web-unsavvy employees fall prey to phishing and other devious ploys. And then there’s the fear that employees will share information they shouldn’t.
Sarah Perez goes into considerable detail on the Sophos report in her post on ReadWriteWeb. Perez also notes that even Sophos isn’t advocating an outright block, despite the study’s findings:
Unfortunately for those in charge of enforcing corporate security, simply blocking Facebook and other social networks via URL is not a realistic solution anymore. The networks are often a large part of a company’s marketing and sales strategies, notes Sophos, meaning they cannot be blocked outright. Instead, companies are encouraged to use a unified approach for mitigating threats that combines data monitoring, malware protection and granular access for their employees.
A Financial Times article (free registration required) has the same advice, noting that organizations have too much to gain from employee interactions on social networks. The article, penned by the head of an information risk management and e-discovery firm, rightly notes that leetting employees access social networks from work gives them “the ability to locate the right people, information and expertise quickly, but they also greatly aid external networking, sales and marketing activities.”
The article (which I discovered on the Idea Peepshow blog, notes thyat 89% of businesses in the UK have no policies governing employee use of social networks and calls for companies to establish and enforce such policies.
As I’ve noted before, protecting the company is a matter of ensuring the proper network safeguards are in place (such as anti-malware/spyware software and the latest virus definitions) and that employees understand their responsibilities.
It works in a lot of companies that don’t block access. It can work in yours.
Reports of the degree to which organizations are blocking employee access to social sites continues to be discouraging, particularly given the reasons for these policies are based on misinformation and a fundamental failure to recognize the value that would accrue to organizations that developed smart policies to foster smart engagement between employees and the public.
This time around, the bad news comes out of the UK, where 90% of councils restrict access to social media. The results come from a study conducted by SOCITM, the professional association for public sector ICT management. Ironically, this group had earlier encouraged organizations to lift such restrictions, recognizing that “social media is…an economical way for public sector organisations to deliver services, communicate with staff and engage with the community.”
According to the study, 67% of councils have implemented scorched-earth policies, blocking all use of social media. Among the remaining 33%, some confine use to lunchtime and before and after work. The SOCITM report interprets these finds as proof that councils don’t see any business value to employee participation in social media.
There’s an almost equal split between councils that view security as the main reason for limiting or blocking access and those who see productivity as the problem. Still, SOCITM believes that stopping employees from tapping into these sites is impossible, given the fact that most workers have their own devices — like smartphones — that give them access to services like Facebook and Twitter. But the fact that employee access increases engagement with the communities the councils serve is the dimension of the report that jumped out at me. According to Christopher Head, who co-authored the report:
CIOs and heads of ICT need to take the lead and educate colleagues on the organisation’s management team about the benefits of social media, as well as finding ways to accommodate them appropriately and safely through the corporate infrastructure.
This advice is coming from more and more quarters, including reserach firm Gartner, which has urged businesses to take advantage of employees’ connection to sites like Facebook to facilitate their business-to-consumer strategies.
It just seems managers would rather succumb to baseless fears and take the easy way out than listen to the advice of experts who know what they’re talking about.
For the first few years of my first job in the business world, my department manager would make monthly circuits of the office carrying pages and pages of telephone records. He would stop at each of his employees’ offices and cubes and review the calls made from their phones. Personal calls earned a rebuke.
Eventually, he gave up on this routine as the company grew to accept calls non-work-related numbers as an integral part of employees’ lives. Making doctors’ appointments, talking to kids’ teachers, checking in at home — these all eventually became non-issues at most organizations.
For the networked generation, checking in on Facebook is no different, according to a Deloitte study that assessed teen attitudes about ethics. Teens “are as likely to post something on a social networking site as they are to pick up a phone,” according to Maureen Mohlenkamp, Deloitte’s deputy ethics officer. According to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article reporting on the study, “Social networking has become so critical to the younger generation of workers, Ms. Mohlenkamp believes that having access to the sites might someday be viewed as an employee perk, along the lines of health benefits or a company cell phone.”
The key takeaway from the study, according to Mohlenkamp: “For companies to be viewed as an employer of choice, they will need to provide access to these sites. Then, it will be important for them to provide the appropriate training and education for new hires to prevent risks to the employee and the organization.”
The training and education will be necessary because 40 percent of teens — along with a third of adults (based on another Deloitte study) — fail to consider that bosses, recruiters, parents and college admission staff could look at, and be influenced by, what they post to their pages.
Opinion Research Corp. conducted the study the week of September 21 among 1,000 teens between the ages of 12 and 17.
Bob LeDrew tweeted the link to this video from TED, featuring Stefana Broadbent. It runs about 9 minutes and the connection between Stefana’s observations about how the Internet fosters intimacy and companies blocking access comes near the end. Stick with it; it’s worthwhile.
I’ve been wondering if there’s any research to suggest that those making the decision to block employee access to social media are mostly non-users of these technologies. There’s anecdotal evidence that organizations that reject blocking are led by people who recognize the value of social media based on their own engagement with it, while the comments of those who defend blocking suggest a high degree of unfamiliarity with the sites they are banning.
I routinely read quotes from executives who have blocked access insisting, for instance, that time spent on Facebook produces no business value. In the meantime, those leaders who are active on Facebook have sussed the business value based on their own interactions — the ability to identify new hires, to hear directly from customers, to evangelize the organization and its products, and so on.
According to a survey from the Government Executive Business Council, half of federal mangers don’t use Facebook at all,and nearly 15% use it less than once per week. Close to 60% of this group has never logged into LinkedIn; 23% it less than once a week. More than 80% said they never Tweet. Seven percent log on less than once each week.
There is no correlation in the study between this lack of familiarity with networks (an obvious consequence of never examining them) and efforts to keep employees from accessing them, but you have to figure these federal managers would be more inclined to buy into the hype and succumb to the temptation to keep employees away from Facebook and other new-media venues. Formal research would probably produce interesting results.
In the meantime, since we’re talking about federal managers here, if the administration is serious about getting government to pursue transparency, collaboration and participation with the public, I agree with NextGov blogger Allan Holmes, who suggests, the government “may want to first encourage federal managers to use these tools.”
(Allan, how about a link to the survey results?)
Hat tip to Tony Molloy for pointing me to the post.
While yet another completely bogus, self-serving studyhas assigned a completely unrealistic dollar amount to employee use of social networks on the job, an unlikely voice has arisen in opposition to blocking employee access.
Ann Cavoukian, the minister privacy commissioner for the Canadian province of Ontario, has called blocking employee access a mistake. According to an article in itbusiness.ca, Cavoukian said, “It’s like waving the proverbial red flag in front of your staff -– it’s almost a challenge to them to find a way around it.”
By itself, that wouldn’t lead most employeres to eschew blocking — after all, they may reason, employees who want to find a way around policies should simply be fired. But Cavoukian doesn’t stop there, noting that bans can often be counterproductive. For example, she said, finding a way to get to the sites they want to can actually take longer than just going to an unblocked site.
Cavoukian was speaking in the wake of a study released by Morse plc, a London-based company that makes money helping companies block employee access to site. Yep, another completely unbiased study by an organization with not self-interest wrapped up in the results.
Morse conducted its survey with 1,460 U.K. office workers. The results: 57% spend 40 minutes per day on average visiting social networks. That adds up to a full week each year, the value of which is, according to Morse, US $2.4 billion dollars in lost productivity.
Morse consultant Phillip Wicks called employee access to social networks “a productivity black hole.” Clearly he hasn’t seen — or has ignored — the unbiased reasearch that shows employees with access to social networks are actually more productive than those without it.
And, of course, the study doesn’t not take into account the hours these employees work in excess of the minimum eight-hour day, the amount of work they take home, and the amount of time spent on social networks that produces a benefit to the organization.
It’s reassuring to know I’m not alone in this assessment. According to Robin Wauters writing in TechCrunch Europe:
Maybe it’s just the concept of ‘business hours’ that isn’t something the new generation of office workers is apt at dealing with, considering they grew up living in a fragmented world where social media make up integral parts of their lives that cannot simply be turned off. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing or a management problem, but one thing it is most definitely not: the fault of Twitter or Facebook.
Or do you really think that guy next to you who spends hours staring at his Facebook news feed is suddenly going to be way more productive when the IT department blocks access to the site?
One more survey to ignore, move along now, nothing to see here.
(Hat tip to Tony Molloy for point out the TechCrunch Europe piece.)
Kudos to Cavoukian, who might also talk about another way in which blocking access is counterproductive: killing employee engagement leading to less enthusiastic and satisfied workers.
Kudos to Robin Wauters.
And to the self-serving, deceptive, methodology-challenged dolts at Morse plc: Fail.
Social media as a marketing mechanism is clearly hot. I can’t scan my feeds without finding yet another report of yet another study detailing companies’ increased commitment to and investment in social media. Here are just a few:
eMarketer reports on an The Aberdeen Group study that found 63% of companies planned to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2009. Twenty-one percent were set to boost their budgets by more than 25%. And worldwide social media advertising was expected to grow 17.3% this year to $2.35 billion.
A study from the Association of National Advertisers revealed that 66% of marketers have used social media in some capacity this year, with Facebook being tapped by 74% of them, YouTube by 65%, and Twitter by 63%.
Twitter is the social media channel of choice among Fortune 100 companies, according to a Burson-Marsteller study, which found 54% of these organizations active on Twitter, compared with 32% using blogs and 29% with active Facebook fan pages.
There is a correlation between financial performance and engagement in social media among the world’s top brands, according to a study conducted by Altimeter Group and WetPaint. Simply stated, socially engaged companies are more financially successful.
And most recently, a study from SNCR, Deloitte, and Beeline Labs released just the other day reports that 94% of respondents said that they plan to maintain or increase investment in their online communities. The investment pays off, they said, in word of mouth, customer loyalty, brand awareness, idea generation, and improved quality of customer support.
The fact that businesses are seeing tangible benefits from social media explains why investment continues to rise among most companies, even when budget belts are being tightened. Driving these results is the that comes from real people connecting with each another in spaces where they share mutual interests. Companies are smart enough to know that (according to research) customers want the companies with which they do business should be present in these spaces.
So it is all the more confounding that these very same companies won’t let their own employees engage on these sites.
As reported here and elsewhere, a survey of CIOs found that 54% of companies block all employees from visiting any social sites. It’s deliciously ironic that 54% is exactly the same percentage of Fortune 100 companies that are active on Twitter.
If companies block their employees from engaging, who do they think their fan pages and Twitter accounts are attracting? Think about it. If every company prohibited employees from visiting Facebook, then the only time anybody could visit the company Facebook fan page would be when they’re not at work. Given the hours most companies require of their employees, that’s not a heck of a lot of time to interact with customers.
What’s more, if the fan pages of those 54% of companies are being viewed by employees from the 46% of companies that still allow some kind of access, none of the companies’ employees are able to interact with those visitors. They can’t. They’ve been blocked.
American Airlines announced just the other day that it’s launching BlackAtlas.com, a travel-focused social network for African Americans. According to one report, “The site will feature discussion boards and blogs on which users can share pictures, video and travel stories and tips, along with rating and recommending businesses and travel destinations.”
I don’t know whether American Airlines allows its own employees to visit social sites, but with more than half of companies in the blocking camp, odds are American’s own black employees will be barred from a site where they could interact with BlackAtlas.com members and personify the airline’s culture.
Gartner, in fact, projects that 60% of the Fortune 1000 will host online communities by 2010 so they can gain information from their customer base “which can be used for short-and long-term customer relationships,” according to Garner researcher Adam Sarner.
Employees at more than half of them, though, are not allowed.
Organizations need to think more like Dell, which realized its roadblock to Facebook made no sense when it launched a green initiative on the social networking site so employees could engage and participate.
The presumption of most companies blocking access is that employees are being unproductive, wasting time. In fact, the lines have blurred so much that even an employee spending a few minutes online to take a break from work could wind up having an interaction that benefits the company.
How have your non-work social interactions wound up serving your organization?
At least 10 of my colleagues have alerted me to a study released yesterday by Robert Half Technology, in which 54% of the sample of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees block employees from accessing any social media at work.
Mashable points out the Robert Half study is consistent with other reports. The trend is gaining momentum.
I even received an email today from a communicator who observed that she received a security notice that access to Stop Blocking was blocked at her organization. Right. God forbid anybody should be able to explore the arguments against this inane and counterproductive practice.
Given the publicity the Half study is getting, it’s worth reiterating the key arguments against blocking.
Well-communicated and consistently enforced policies will deal with most issues. The number of companies blocking access to social media sites is roughly on par with the number of companies without social media policies. Isn’t it possible that employees who knew what the rules were might actually follow them? Especially if they knew there were real and serious consequences for failing to do so?
Access to social media improves productivity. According to Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, “Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access.” But multiplestudies prove exactly the opposite.
Productivity concerns are based on fatally flawed assumptions. First, there is research to suggest that every hour an employee spends at work on non-work-related websites is compensated for by an hour spent away from work on work-related activities. Do you check your work-related email on your mobile phone before you even get out of bed? Most knowledge workers say they do. Second, there are work-related benefits to social media activities, including collaboration, mindsharing and professional social networking amongst employees, affiliates and partners, according to David Lavenda of WorkLight (drawing on results from a Gartner study).
Employees don’t need your network. I can access any social network I like on my iPhone and my Palm Pre. I have a laptop with built-in access to the Sprint network that gets me on any site I want. Employees can (and do) bring these tools to the workplace. Your blocks have no impact. Employees can still get to Facebook all they want.
Who died and put CIOs in charge of worker productivity anyway? I’m not sure when supervisors and HR abdicated this responsibility to IT, but IT is simply not qualified to address employee productivity.
Blocking kills engagement. There are plenty of studies that tie high levels of worker engagement to increased growth and profitability. Trust is a pillar of engagement. So what happens to engagement when all employees get the same message, “We don’t trust any of you, not a single damn one of you, as far as we can throw you, so we’re blocking all of you”? Bye bye, engagement.
Access to social media is not an automatic invitation to viruses and malware. Those companies that do permit employee access have found ways to protect their networks. For many of the companies blocking access based on the fear of infection, it’s just easier to block than to find ways to protect the network while providing access. Laziness is not an excuse for blocking.
Millenials will not work for companies that block. These workers — the ones you need to hire to replace the retiring boomers — are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate them. Many simply won’t work for companies that block access, which means you’re left to hire your second and third choices. Is mediocrity actually a hiring goal in your organization?
Bandwidth is a bogus issue. Bandwidth is the paper of the digital era. Can you imagine a company 25 years ago telling workers, “We’d love to get memos and publications to you, but we don’t have enough paper”? The very notion is absurd. They’d buy more paper. Companies pinching pennies on bandwidth are doing themselves a disservice in many more ways than one.
Please suport the Stop Blocking initiative. Contribute research you’re aware of to the wiki. Share how your access to social networks and other web content has benefitted you at work. Share how blocking has restricted your ability to be as effective as possible at work. Link to Stop Blocking; feel fee to use the Stop Blocking badges on your blog or site. We must get the word out that blocking is a counterproductive, knee-jerk practice that must be stopped for the sake of the very companies that are implementing it.
A study from a research group in the UK has determined that employees who take short breaks online — using Facebook, for instance — can improve employee productivity. MindLap International looked at European women from seven countries. The study deliberately provoked stress among the test subjects by having them complete computer-based intelligence tests. The women were then given 10-minute breaks to go online before returning to the test. The breaks reduced stress and improved productivity.
Companies everywhere are blocking employee access to the Net, fueled by questionable research and irresponsible pronouncements of self-serving individuals and organizations. This site is designed to serve as a hub information resource for those who believe the benefits of providing access far outweigh the risks.
