Social networks "vital" for business: report

Stephen Withers
Monday, 07 July 2008 11:14

IT Industry - Market

More interestingly, the survey found 33 percent of employees think social networking sites can be used within the office, leading Konica Minolta to conclude that managers failing to use such sites as a way of communicating with their staff could "be widening the gap between themselves and their employees".

Well, that's possibly true. But is a public space an appropriate forum for at-work communication?

However, there seems to be growing concern about the effect frequent interruptions have on people's productivity. At the risk of being written off as an out of touch greybeard, imagine this scenario: mail is delivered once a day, and the phone (shared between half a dozen people) rings maybe ten times a day. That was the reality of my first full-time job, and it made it possible to concentrate for a couple of hours on one task.

So perhaps there are ways that social networking technology - perhaps implemented privately - could be harnessed to deliver some of the information and interaction needed at work, without as many of the interruptions caused by the surfeit of emails and instant messages flying to and fro within many organisations.

For all the talk of younger workers being used to multitasking, I've yet to see any evidence that their productivity isn't harmed by frequent interruptions. So maybe diverting even a modest proportion of email and IM traffic to a social network site that doesn't demand attention every few minutes will provide a payoff.