(ABC News)--When does twittering at work become frittering away your employer's time
-- and money? When your tweets aren't work-related. Business research
firm Basex puts the productivity cost of workplace interruptions,
including employee abuse and misuse of social media, at $650 billion a
year. Now, some companies are fighting back.
Eliyahu Federman, senior vice president of 1SaleADay.com,
a deal-a-day company in Miami that sells watches, clothing, jewelry,
electronics (among other things), says he got fed up with what he calls
employees' "frolicking outside the work context."
As first reported by the New York Post -- and as recounted by Federman
himself in a story he subsequently wrote for the website Social Media
Today -- he first tried blocking employee access to social media sites.
Forbes says 42 percent of all employers have tried the same tactic to
the problem of frittering by Twittering. Other employers have installed
network monitoring software to keep tabs on employees' communications
while at work, says Federman.
According to Nielsen/Incite's Social Media Report for 2012, Americans
spent 74 billion minutes, or 20 percent of their time, on social media
sites. Such networking, Federman allows, has become part of life, both
on and off the company clock. Nor does he begrudge employees their
impulse to socialize.
"The need to be social is a human need," he tells ABC News. Workers will
do it around the water cooler, or they'll do it online. But social
media sites, says Federman, make it easier than ever before. "They
provide a high level of engagement -- like a cocktail party," he says.
"They are designed to suck you into a vortex of social mayhem, and are
designed to do that very well."
The problem with trying to block access to them, he says, is that it's
become easy for employees to circumvent such blocking by using their own
mobile devices. For that reason, he tells ABC News, 1SaleADay
eventually gave up on blocking and tried a different approach.
Instead of trying to suppress employees' addiction to social media, the company chose to channel it.
Federman installed an in-house, employee-only social media platform
called Yammer, and offered it as an alternative to Facebook. Such
platforms, sometimes called enterprise social networks, have become a
big business: Microsoft bought Yammer for a reported $1.2 billion last
June.
Federman says the benefits of weaning workers off Facebook and onto
Yammer have been dramatic. In the customer service department alone, he
says, productivity has risen a little more than 48 percent. "We're
getting, on average, $5 an hour more per worker in productivity," he
tells ABC News. Plus, he says, morale has improved. Employees didn't
like being denied access to Twitter and Facebook. Yammer gives them an
alternative most of them seem to find acceptable: Their socializing is
limited to fellow workers; but limited socializing is apparently better
than none at all.
No matter what an employer does, workers will, of course, still stare
out windows or phone their spouses or buy sweaters online. "But this is
a major step in the right direction," says Federman. The difference
between banning social media and rechanneling the social impulse, he
says, is simple: "If you try to remove it completely, people will find a
way to access it and will not be happy. Our idea was to replicate it
within the company and, by doing that, to increase camaraderie."
The response Federman has gotten so far to his article -- much of it
from other employers -- has been strong: As of Monday, he says he had
received more than 400 tweets and more than 100 LinkedIn shares.
Copyright 2013 by ABC News
