Social Networking Flexes its Muscles
You used to be able to access social networking sites like Facebook from your work PC but now it has been taken away. Why? How can you possibly arrange the weekend without it? How can you check what photos you have been tagged in from last weekend?
Facebook is, according to the web information company Alexa, the most popular social networking site having overtaken MySpace last month. It also joins the list of sites companies prefer not to have workers using. Reasons for blocking sites vary from the concerns about network traffic, issues around data security down to the slightly more honest “you are here to work not browse”. I know of one company that has even blocked news sites including the BBC.
While I do agree that during working hours the need for access to such sites has very little credibility, there is no compelling reason to block access which also includes lunch hours. After all, your unpaid time at lunch has been compromised by the location of your work. You can’t exercise free choice in what you do, and if you live more than half an hour from home you wouldn’t even be able to check your Facebook page.
So how do you get your Facebook access at work? The answer came in a month or so ago with an email to Gamercize customer services, which found its way to my desk. The email was from an employee of a large corporation that had banned Facebook and was located out of town in a remote commercial zone. The disappointed worker had been keeping in touch with friends not by company telephone or company email, but by Facebook. He asked if we could contact his boss with an idea.
That is exactly what I did, putting forward his idea to use a couple of PCs, due for replacement, to be moved into the canteen and put on the internet. The justification for having these machines was given by having them connected with the Gamercize PC-Sport Stepper, helping the company provide exercise in the workplace. The two “Internet Café” machines, as they have been called, have been in for a week now and proved very popular.
Happy employees get to use the internet in their free time, without losing the opportunity for lunchtime exercise. The corporation is happy that they can provide this service to their employees and can start to address work health targets. Now all that remains if for those employees to fan the Gamercize Facebook page!
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