A colleague sent this screen capture to me. It’s what he got on his work computer after he tried to access this site, StopBlocking.org:
That’s right. Websense — maker of site-blocking tools — blocked this site. Now, Websense could have been truthful in its explanation for why it blocks access to StopBlocking.org. It could have said, “We’re not providing access to this site because if you read it and agree with it, you may no longer want to pay us for our products.” Instead, Websense resorts to dishonesty. In case you can’t read the small print, here’s what it says:
“Security risk blocked for your protection. This Websense category is filtered: Proxy Avoidance. Sites in this category may pose a security threat to network resources or private information, and are blocked by your organization.”
Let’s be clear: This is a WordPress blog and a WikiMedia wiki. It’s nothing but text and graphic images. There is no software to download, no forms to complete. You need a password to edit the wiki, but that’s just to keep spammers out. No personal information is collected as part of the password process. And you don’t have to be a wiki editor to read the wiki contents, so there’s no need to even get a password if you don’t want to contribute to the contents.
In other words, in absolutely no way is StopBlocking.org a security risk.
I can’t say I’m surprised. Any company that would make up numbers about lost productivity would make up excuses to mask the real reason they don’t want you to read the contents of a website.
At first, I shrugged off the semi-literate comment left to one of my posts over on Stop Blocking, the site I started to advocate for reasonable employee access to the Net, and particularly to social media sites.
The post to which “reason,” as he called himself left a comment reported on a study that showed 54% of companies were blocking access. Here’s his response:
isnt it funny in todays world how everyone thinks they deserve better than what they are getting without haveing to really work for it no job owes you facebook time so feel your rights are being taken for granted grow up you big baby work time is not your fun time so if you block your workers from facebook @ work dont feel that blocking reduces productivity and engagement, limits recruiting capabilities, and denies networking that ultimately benefits the organization. thats a bunch of crap do your job facebook dont pay your bills you lucky to even have a job.
I blew off the comment initially, relegating it to the “just doesn’t get it” dustbin. But I found the comment kept coming back to me, not because reason’s reasoning is right but because he seems to think that I’m advocating for employee rights in my efforts to get companies to stop blocking.
I’m not an employee rights advocate. If I were, very few of my clients would be interested in my services. My goal is to help organizations succeed. I’ve achieved my goals if companies are more profitable, more competitive, more nimble, more productive. I’m campaigning to get companies to open employee access to social sites because increasingly the networked connectivity of workers is driving competitiveness, productivity and other indicators of improved performance.
The fact is, through all my years working in employee communications, I’ve never been concerned with whether employees are happy. It’s not a company’s job to ensure employee happiness. Employee job satisfaction is another story. It’s tangible, it’s measurable and it has a direct bearing on employee engagement, which is a predictor of organizational growth.
But even job satisfaction is just one return a company gets from networked employees. Zappos encourages its employees to network on the job, resulting in a reputation for stellar customer service. Employees engaged in their social networks can also reduce the cost and improve the quality of recruiting. It can surface issues the company needs to address. It can generate ideas for new products and services. It improves employee productivity.
On that last note, productivity, I came across an item today on TMCnet sporting the provocative headline, “Workplace Productivity at an All-Time Low.” The press release touted the products of a company called Pandora — not the music streaming site, blocked by a number of companies — but rather one that “allows managers to analyze activities performed by employees and the time spent on different work items. It also affords the ability to track computer usage at a group and/or an individual level, cross-reference activities reported by an employee, and access an employee’s desktop in real-time.”
The all-time low productivity claim is based on this calculation:
On average, workers with an Internet connection spend 21 hours per week online while in the office, a little more than four hours per day. And on average, 26% of that time is spent on personal-interest websites. That amounts to roughly an hour per day, or 22 hours per month.
Pandora is just one of many companies that profit from the fear they produce with such outlandish claims. As I’ve repeatedly noted, these calculations don’t account for the benefits such networking brings to the organization, the improved productivity highlighted in a University of Melbourne study, or the amount of work these employees perform outside the 9-to-5 office hours because they’re networked. In fact, another story that crossed my desk today points out that companies in the UK were able to maintain productivity even as snowbound workers were unable to get to the office because their ability to connect with each other and the office let them get their work done from home.
And, as I’ve also noted before, these lost-productivity assertions don’t stand up to statistical scrutiny. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased in the third quarter of 2009 by 8.1%. That’s a far more credible number than the back-of-the-envelope calculations Pandora, Websense and other monitoring-and-blocking companies use in their scare campaigns. In fact, it reveals the productivity claims by these companies as an outright lie.
Yet these tactics continue to influence managers, as evidenced by the fact that most companies block access despite the fact that blocking is contrary to their own self interests.
Leaders need to realize that organizations that encourage their employees to network during work — guided by clear policies and improved business literacy — will experience success that eclipses that of organizations that block access.
It’s not a question of employee entitlements. It’s a question of smart business practices.
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.
This blog focuses mostly on the value to organizations of allowing their employees to access the social web. It is equally important, though, to grasp th degree to which employees are desperate to use these tools — not to waste time, necessarily, but in many cases because they help employees do their jobs.
The “Government of Canada 2.0″ blog recently published an instructional guide to help employees of Canada’s government get unblocked. The blog is hardly an official government vehicle. In fact, it’s upfront about being “in no way endorsed by the Government of Canada.”
The post, “Strategy to get your Internet unblocked,” is “a bullet-point strategy to possibly unblocking Internet sites. I’m taking a business-oriented approach here, and broad general steps.”
What follows is a guide to overcoming a staggering government bureaucracy that involves sending requests to the Help Desk to determine whether an unblocking process exists and taking appropriate steps based on the answer. The author — Douglas Bastien from Ottawa — also offers tips, like articulating the business case for access in writing, communicating the business need to higher-ups, and asking for the rationale behind the blocks that do exist.
Bastien also refers to policies addressed in an earlier post, a 1998 policy on the use of electronic networks and a 2003 policy on management of information technology. Bastien writes,
I’m actually convinced that the TBS policies don’t block access; it’s restrictions from the department, exerted through Deputy heads’ (continuing) implementation of these policies because ”Deputy heads have a responsibility to put in place policies and practices that promote the appropriate use of electronic networks… consistent with the operational needs of the workplace”.
Beyond working within the system, though Bastien doesn’t see much hope of getting access to employees — access he believes employees need to do their jobs. “Your only last option is leaving to go elsewhere,” he writes, acknowledging that for many, it’s just not an option. He does, however, point out that some corners of government are beginning to recognize the relevance of unfettered employee acccess.
There are those who work corporately toward a balanced use of Government network, such as my blogging mentor Etienne Laliberté, whose post “Facing Facebook” communicates the trust position he pursued for his department on Facebook (applicable to other social networks). Please read the article, we need more managers like this paving the way for acceptable use of social networking, than just blocking it outright, or not blocking it and pointing fingers at those who break the rules.
Bastien also lists some means by which employees can simply route around the blocks, but clearly he’s more interested in employees en masse making the case for access.
Hat tip to Donna Papacosta for pointing me to Bastien’s post.
Abuse of an established company policy is a management issue. Even when it involves company systems, it is not an IT issue. The abdication of management responsibilities to IT may briefly create the perception that the problem has been solved. In fact, a larger problem has been created.
Consider the case of a Boston-area hospital which has blocked access for all of its employees to social networking sites. According to a memo issued to employees,
The decision is based on recent evidence that some employees have been using these sites to comment on Hospital business, which is a violation of the Hospital’s Electronic Communications policy and a potential HIPAA violation.
In other words, the actions of a few employees have led the hospital’s management to ban access to these resources for all employees, including those who have abided by the hospital’s Electronic Communications policy. The message this sends to the majority of employees who play by the rules:
Your good behavior is irrelevant. We have opted to trust none of you.
This message can only result in deterioration of employee commitment and engagement. It would have taken more effort for the hospital to identify those who absued the privilege and discipline them according to the established policy. It would also have required some effort to communicate to the rest of the workforce that the hospital regretfully had to enforce the policy, and will continue to enforce it.
But employee behaviors are managed through reward and recognition. Recognizing that consequences will befall employees who violate policies is a sure way to obtain compliance. Sadly, it is far easier to simply block everybody than to take the correct steps.
But this hospital goes one jaw-dropping step further, noting in the memo that…
The Executive Team will be working in the coming months to ensure that we have written policies in place that articulate the appropriate use of social networking sites while on duty at the Hospital. Once these written policies are in place, we have educated all employees about expectations and disciplinary action associated with violating the policies, and we have the appropriate IS tools in place to track utilization and monitor content, we will consider once again providing access to these sites. We expect this will take a period of about 6 months.
Six months?
Several hospital social media policies are in place and available online, including those of The Mayo Clinic, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Henry Ford Health, and The Cleveland Clinic. Why should even the most tangled of bureaucracies require six months to review the best practices and put a policy in place?
Finally, as I have noted before, most employees have cell phones and will be able to post exactly the same HIPAA violations to the same networks using their personal Internet-connected devices. Blocking access on hospital computers will prevent exactly nothing.
This is precisely the kind of brain-dead, mindless, knee-jerk reaction that is crippling organizations as they move ienvitably into a networked ecosystem. I learned about the situation on “Running a Hospital,” the blog by Paul Levy, CEO of another Boston-area hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess. Paul published the hospital memo in its entirety, but introduced it, in part, with these words:
you can guess my view of this: 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.
There are voices of reason with an eye on the long-term view in the world of business. We need to spread those voices and offer the alternatives to mindless blocking of all content from all employees.
In this case, a clearly-communicated and enforced policy would have done the trick. Instead, this unnamed Boston-area hospital has taken proactive steps to disenfranchising its workforce while inhibiting the sharing of information and keeping virtually no employees from using these social sites.
Reports of companies blocking access to social sites are often accompanied by a proclamation by a business leader or IT manager declaring that there is simply no business value in employees spending time in this venues.
Dave Knox, corporate marketing brand manager for Digital Business Strategy at P&G, begs to differ. Interviewed by Vince Thompson on his Smart Planet blog, Knox asserts that the time he spends on social sites provides perspective that he’s able to apply directly to his work.
When working for a big corporation, you have an amazing amount of resources at your fingertips. And you are surrounded by incredibly smart people. But most of these people have a similar background to you and are trained to approach problems in the same way. My blog has helped me by giving me access to people with different backgrounds and views on the business world. It is a way to connect with these people outside of my day to day work and really get a set of different viewpoints on what is going on with marketing.
My external network has emerged as my business filter, allowing me to sort through the noise and keep on top of what is really important. While it might save time in the short-term to slow down in social media, I think it would hurt me in the long term in terms of personal growth and knowledge.
Getting your job done has short- and long-term dimensions. Business leaders looking for long-term value from their employees need to get beyond the superficial understanding of social media and grasp the long-term value that can accrue to the organization when its employees are able interact with communities outside the company’s cloistered environment.
Measuring that long-term value — the worth of the insights and knowledge gained from online social interaction — sounds like a great project for somebody. In the meantime, what value has your on-the-job engagement in social media produced for your organization?
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.
I’m not an employee rights advocate. If I were, very few of my clients would be interested in my services. My goal is to help organizations succeed. I’ve achieved my goals if companies are more profitable, more competitive, more nimble, more productive. I’m campaigning to get companies to open employee access to social sites because increasingly the networked connectivity of workers is driving competitiveness, productivity and other indicators of improved performance.