UK Local Authority Bans Facebook - Is There a Better Way?
The BBC has reported that Portsmouth City Council has banned staff from accessing a number of web sites including facebook, Bebo, Twitter and eBay. The council had previously banned YouTube.
The report states that council staff had clocked up nearly 400 hours per month on facebook alone. Using the handy Bloxx productivity calculator, that equates to around £60,000 per year excluding overhead costs. Lets assume the overhead cost takes that up £80,000. Opportunity cost for the public sector is a little bit more tricky as unlike most businesses the public sector is a cost centre. However, it’s likely that there was an impact on the delivery of council services. I’ll be generous and ignore this for now.
If we assume that the usage by staff was similar across all of the blocked sites, then the cost to the council and hence taxpayers could easily have reached £320,000. And that’s probably the tip of the iceberg!
In these tough economic times and the increasing pressure on public spending that’s a staggering number.
However, it appears that the council’s only answer is to introuduce a complete ban on staff accessing these sites.
That might work for a while, but I’m sure staff will soon find other sites to spend time on. Let’s face it the Intenet is a pretty big place.
The draconian approach seldom works, and many of the customers we work with take a approach that allows staff access to these types of sites during specified times - for example during lunch breaks - but blocks access to them during other times. This approach seems to work and certainly seems to curtail the problem of staff spending too much time surfing when they should be working. Big Yellow is one company that has used Bloxx Web Filtering to proactively manage Social Networking.
One other point, it’s very unlikley that all of the 4500 computer users in the council are using facebook. It’s more likely that a small number of staff will be facebook addicts. This clearly highlights the need for all organisations to develop, deploy and manage a robust acceptable use policy that lets users knwo exactly what and what isn’t acceptable use of the Internet.
