NutshellMail Blog

Social Networking at Work (Part II of III)

Are you worried about employees wasting precious time on Facebook and Twitter? According to IT World, U.S. employees squander between 30 minutes and three hours each day on social networks. In our last article, we discussed how social networking can be a great tool and proposed several ways your company can benefit from allowing employees to access their social networks. In this post, we will address the concerns about employees wasting time on these sites. By looking at best practices for using email, we have identified several ways to leverage social networks without wasting company time.

Just like social networking, unencumbered use of email can be a dangerous distraction and a major drain on productivity. A recent study by the University of Loughborough in England suggests that an employee loses two to five minutes of work time whenever they receive a new email message. By monitoring how employees use email, the study discovered that most participants checked their email inbox every five minutes and 70 percent of users stopped working to check their email within 10 seconds of seeing a new message notification flash across their screen. This addictive behavior creates a vicious cycle of inefficiencies.

But there are best practices to share with your employees, and if discussed openly, it’s likely they will take heed:

Encourage employees to check their social networks only once or twice a day

The solution for not wasting time with email, according to productivity experts David Allen, author of Getting Things Done and Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, is to select one or two times in the day to check email. In addition, they recommend that you turn off your new email notification tool. Checking email once or twice a day can free up precious time that can be allocated to getting work done. According to Allen and Ferriss, waiting a few hours to respond to an email is perfectly acceptable; if a contact needs to get in touch with you more rapidly, they can always call you on the phone or send you an instant message. While this advice may be hard to chew for those who rely heavily on email each day, the same principal can certainly be applied to the lower priority communications sent through social networks. By setting aside a few times in the day to check your social networks and even email, we can save hours of time each day.

Encourage employees to consolidate their social networking streams

Another problem with both email and social networks is that most users subscribe to multiple accounts, which means they must monitor activity across several channels. Many users simply leave their social networking sites open in their browser all day, but just like email, they often stop work to check for new activity on a regular basis. Technology has solved this problem for email by creating email clients that can monitor multiple accounts. Some users even forward messages from multiple accounts into a single primary inbox, creating one main dashboard for checking messages across all their accounts.

Develop a clear social networking policy and utilize technology made for consolidation

To ensure that their employees do not waste company time on social networks, managers can take the following steps:

1. Develop a clear social networking policy
2. Utilize new technologies that can help employees save time on social networks

Good policy

Good policy and open communication is the simplest way to make sure your employees remain productive while at work. Responsible managers should inform employees about the dangers of social networks (and email). Establishing guidelines for how employees can use social networks and setting limits on the amount of time they spend on these sites can go a long way. However, policies are difficult to enforce and employees may take advantage of your company’s inability to dynamically monitor their activity on social networks.

Here’s a sample of publicly available social media policies that can help get your started. You can use these as your template and customize it for your company: http://www.socialmedia.biz/social-media-policies/

On technology

Combining good policy with productivity software is the most prudent approach. But remember, some technologies can actually exacerbate the problems. In the tech world, there has been much talk about the “real-time stream” and there are several products that are designed to constantly deliver your social networking stream in real time. However, in the business context, these tools can create additional distractions. As noted, most users will stop what they are doing to read their new emails anytime they hit the inbox. The constant stream of social networking feeds only compounds this problem. Consequently, we cannot recommend using any of these tools in the workplace.

However, several companies have designed efficient solutions that can help your employees to stay connected without wasting time. NutshellMail, for instance, works by delivering a single email digest of your employees’ social networking activity on a recurring schedule that they define. NutshellMail has taken a page from the teachings of Allen and Ferriss by enabling users to receive their digests at prescribed times during the day (most users receive three digests per day, but you could work to encourage employees to only get it once or twice a day). With this email service, your employees can also reply to messages, update their status and share stories without having to leave their email inbox. In short, your employees have a single place where they can access and respond to all their social networking messages without the risk of them being sucked into wasting countless hours refreshing and updating their social networking sites. In addition, because NutshellMail works through traditional email channels, all social networking communications can be monitored and retained like any other email.

A prudent manager does not have to shut down access to social networks. By establishing good policy and leveraging technology to make it easier for employees to be efficient when accessing and responding to their social networking contacts, he or she can mitigate productivity concerns and effectively align social networking with business objectives. Fifteen years from now, we may find it incredible to think that a business could thrive without leveraging the power of social networks, just as we know that most businesses today cannot succeed without email.

Okay, so you’ve unblocked social media for your employees, written up a great policy and selected a technology tool to keep it all manageable. But now you’re concerned about security. In our next post, we will address how you can overcome the security threats related to social networking.

Nirav Batavia is VP of Interactive Marketing for NutshellMail (www.nutshellmail.com), the first social networking management tool that combines the best of the Social Web with the original killer app: email. The service lets you organize, customize, monitor, manage and interact with all your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.) and extra email accounts from an interactive email dashboard delivered directly to your favorite inbox on a schedule that you choose. NutshellMail is part of the fbFund REV incubator program, a joint venture between Facebook, Founders Fund and Accel Partners to seed and incubate early stage companies. NutshellMail keeps you connected and saves you time.