Too much employee 'socialising' for Aussie businesses

Peter Dinham
Monday, 01 June 2009 16:11

IT Industry - Market

According to Harcourt, if an employee spends as much as an hour a day on Facebook, it can “end up costing a business thousands of dollars in lost time over the course of a year.”

Harcourt, who says Telstra Business has now released a range of security tools through MessageLabs to allow employers to block or restrict the use of social networking sites during office hours, the latest research by Nielsen Online shows that, despite the productivity risks, social networking has exploded in recent years in the workplace.

“It’s more popular than email, and small business owners and managers are now responding with blanket bans.  Bigger companies, including Telstra, have introduced social media policies providing guidelines to staff on acceptable usage.

“There is a clear need for formal policies on the use of social networking sites in the workplace and the appropriate and effective software tools that support those policies,” Harcourt adds.

And, according to Kerrie-Anne Turner, senior director for the SaaS Group at Symantec, on top of distracting workers from doing their jobs, excessive online social networking in a smaller office can also drain crucial and expensive bandwidth and cut into IT costs.

“Individual employers have different views on social networking but the overwhelming trend seem to favour blocking access to these sites, particularly in light of the economic environment.

“The MessageLabs tools we have made available on Telstra’s T-Suite service can not only block web use based on alert terms, specific sites and applications, but also include an unmonitored, personal-time feature for lunchtime and other approved breaks during the day.”