Should Facebook be Banned at Workplaces?

Who are you Kidding? Very many organizations are debating about this same issue, whether to permanently forbid their employees from accessing Facebook or to let them indulge further with this immeasurable blessing that came from nowhere! Those that advocate for Facebook’s censorship at the workplace, like my friend on the right, say that employees’ productivity is negatively affected when they ‘waste’ valuable time adding friends and commenting on pictures instead of directing their efforts to completing assignments. My answer to those people is; who are you kidding? When you get drunk, do you blame it on the alcohol or your lack of self control? Which kind of employer will pay you a salary before warning you about your slumping productivity? Every employee knows at the back of their mind that if they are not productive, their jobs are at stake, and Facebook must be such an embarrassing reason to be put on one’s letter of dismissal. Therefore, organizations must concentrate on reminding workers that productivity is the sole motivation that will guarantee their job safety, instead of denying them an opportunity to exploit advances in technology. Besides that, Facebook (let me call it fb) is no longer just a time-wasting application for poking people and building mafia families, it’s now a critical part of daily communications with co-workers, customers, and others within the same industry. I’m sure that some bosses who want to ban fb are simply naïve about how the network operates. Whereas they judge fb as a useless tool, their entrepreneurial competitors are advertising their companies and products, creating pages for consumer opinions and encouraging their employees to market the company to their friends on fb. If they knew the free marketability and publicity that fb avails to a company, those bosses would even create a fb department instead of trying to get rid of it! This is because fb gives businesses an incredible opportunity to widen their market. For example, a business can target an audience of thousands without much effort or expensive advertising. By creating a good company profile on fb, a new market opens up for the business at a very low cost. Employees can then monitor the progress of the company page and also keep it lively by posting some nice gossip about the business or offering special discounts that would be exclusive to fb friends. Another reason why fb should stay at the workplace is because it gives workers a chance to reset their concentration. That means that companies who block access to fb are actually inadvertently decreasing employee productivity. As a matter of fact, companies should worry more about workers who seem to be always ‘busy’ than those who take a few moments to jot down a profile statement. Besides, I hate to break the news to anti-fb bosses that, employees have always found ways to take sometime off work, while still at it. Before fb, before computers even existed, workers would typically gather around the canteen for some mindless chit-chat. Does this call for canteens to be banned too? mugishaivan@yahoo.com