Most businesses plan to monitor or limit employee access
tosocial networkingsites, as concern grows over
their impact on productivity at work, research by
ComputerWeekly.com has revealed.
The survey of 361 UK IT decision makers found that 77% of
businesses that allow access to sites such as
Facebook and
MySpace plan to monitor or limit staff access to them. Eleven
per cent plan to ban access at work completely in the next six
months.
The survey revealed that firms are more worried about employees
wasting company time and lost productivity (50%) than security
(17%) or damage to reputation (3%).
IT managers estimated that employees spend an average of 50
minutes on social networking sites per day. This rose to 56 minutes
among those companies allowing unlimited access, and 62 minutes
among London-based companies.
One IT manager, who asked to remain anonymous, said his company
had fired an employee after discovering he had spent six hours a
day acting as an unofficial moderator for one popular social
networking site.
Alim Ozcan, head of IM&T customer services at the
London Ambulance Service, said he had banned the use of
Facebook and other social networking sites even though access to
webmail is allowed.
"Sites like Facebook are more interactive and can engulf the
time an employee should be working. Web e-mail is more static and
something I have no problem with," he said.
Forty five per cent of IT managers said workloads have increased
as a result of policing social networking sites. And 35% said
e-mail servers were under increased pressure from incoming e-mails
from these sources.
Ian Campbell, IT director at British Energy, said he was not
against social networking sites in principle, because they can
allow staff to network and collaborate. But he said firms had to
introduce mandatory "reasonable use" policies.
Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said
businesses allowing unrestricted access (37%) must be aware of
potential security and reputation threats, and advised companies to
develop strong acceptable-use polices.
"Unsanctioned employee use opens up a Pandora's box of security
risks, including customer data being leaked outside the firewall,"
he said. Koplowitz advised businesses to audit unofficial use of
social networking sites and educate users in how to use them
without exposing the company to security threats.
Social networking: the bigger pictrure >>
Stuart King's analysis of the survey results >>