Facebook Finally Makes Money and Theo has a Rant about Facebook in the Workplace
After five years and with over 300 million users signed up, Facebook has at last reached break even point. The company has seen a tripling of users in the last 12 months, has recently launched a revamped search engine and is soon to launch an online payment system. Analysts are predicting income to rise by 70% this year.
All great news for Facebook.
But maybe not such good news for employers?
In a recent Daily Mail article, Theo Paphitis, entrepreneur, multi millionaire and Dragon, had a fairly lengthy rant on the issues of social networking in the workplace.
The article is headed up “Why ALL bosses should copy me and ban Facebook from the workplace.”
Oddly enough, while I agree with the general issue of staff using the Internet when they should be working, I thnk the approach is unworkable.
The experience we have had with customers is that outright bans seldom work. Staff will soon find ways round the company web filter using anonymous proxies and so the problem persists.
Far better to implement a robust Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that lays out exactly how the Internet shuould be used. For example, the AUP could state that non-work related sites such as Social Networking, Shopping, Travel and so on can only be accessed during break times. Of course then the AUP needs to be proactively enforced and managed using a web filter, such as the Bloxx Web Filtering Appliance.
The Bloxx content filtering appliance is very easy to configure to creat multiple access policies based on a range of parameters including user, user groups and so on. In addition the policies can be modified based on time of day.
One company who had a problem with social networking and solved it with its Bloxx Web content filter is The Big Yellow Group - read how the company did it.
