Social media use at work – everybody’s doing it (but should they?)

It comes as no surprise to see that new polls show that folks are using social media sites at work at an ever increasing rate.  In fact, if any poll had shown otherwise I would have suspected it was wrong. 

But is this large-scale use of social media a good thing, or a bad thing, when done by employees at work, while on the clock.  As it is with most things in law, the answer is: it depends.

Are you the type of business where having your employees build social networks is a critical part of their job?  For example, trying to keep sales and marketing staff off of social media, for many businesses, would be tantamount to corporate suicide.  Connecting with people is what sales and marketing folks are supposedto do, and allowing them to do their job through electronic means is, in many cases, necessary.  That said, does every member of the administrative staff need access to Facebook?  Perhaps (depending on the type of business) but in many other cases perhaps not. 

The better question, however, is this: What are you trying to accomplishby permitting access?  Does the employee at issue do their job better if they are connected?  Is the employee happier because of it?  Will it distract them from their job, or help them do their job more effectively?  Are you working in a regulated industry (like the securities industry) where social media use could present a whole bushel of additional problems?  Or are you an entrepreneurial start-up where you need everyone on staff to be reaching out at all times to everyone they know?

These are the types of questions you should ask yourself regularly, becuase while there is no right answer applicable to every business, the wrong answer defnitively involves never asking the question in the first place.