Thought-Provoking Thursday: How Facebook Might Not Hurt Your Productivity After All
For everyone who tweets,“tumbls,” pins, posts, “likes” or Skypes during business hours, a bit of good news: your social media accounts might not be damaging your work performance as much as your boss thinks. In fact, according to two pieces of new research, your social media involvement might actually be helping your productivity.
Yes, that’s right: Tuesday’s Twitter-induced (temporary) market crash aside, social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn and even Twitter aren’t entirely bad for your career. Consider Exhibit A, which comes from data analytics firm Evolv. They surveyed over 39,000 call center employees and found that those who use between one and four social networks have longer tenures at their jobs; a second survey of nearly 5,000 employees found that those who belong to five social networks or more have higher sales conversions than employees who aren’t as socially connected.
Evolv managing director Dr. Mike Housman was careful to note that they don’t yet know why this correlation exists, though he has a few hypotheses. “There’s a component of these results that people are more tech-savvy, more computer proficient,” he said. “People who are more technically proficient, do better. It’s also a measure of how socially engaged you are within the internet. That social engagement probably links to [job] engagement and being able to sell products.”
Now, these results do not mean the Facebook-resistant need to suddenly create accounts for the sake of their job, or that pinning pictures of pot roasts means a better annual review. Instead, Housman said that what’s important is to focus on how you interact with technology as a whole. “I would argue that more computer usage is a good thing. If you’re more interactive — using Outlook, Word, Excel — being familiar with computers is a good thing,” he said. “I don’t think the takeaway is ‘join five sites.’”
Joe Nandhakumar, professor of information systems at the University of Warwick in the U.K, recently published similar findings January’s Information Systems Journal. After studying managers and analysts working at a global telecommunications firm in Finland, Germany and the U.K, he found that integrating social media functions — like instant messaging and chatting on Skype — with work can help foster collaboration and faster results.
“What we observed was that many users saw the emerging social media platform as providing a sense of awareness of others who are digitally connected and able to work together differently, often more effectively,” Nandhakumar said in an email. “For example, when they need to provide certain solutions to customers’ specific needs, design engineers from different locations used the social media capabilities… to interact and discuss ways of effectively configuring products — this was previously not possible.”
Nandhakumar said that, in the workers he observed, social media not only improved task completion but helped make their work “more people-centered and interaction-oriented,” rather than just transaction-focused. In other words, social media helped the workers become more social — in a good way.
“Digital connectivity through the use of social media in work settings seems to be helping ‘regular people’ at work rather than disrupting their work,” he said. “Management should adopt policies that encourage the use of such social media technologies for the serving of organizational goals — social media could afford workers much greater latitude and control over their timing and location of their work.”
Evolv’s Housman had a similar message to employers and upper management. “We think it’s really interesting that people who are using a different number of social networks stay longer, perform better. Don’t dismiss these people out of hand when they may be perfectly good, if not better, employees.”
For everyone who tweets,“tumbls,” pins, posts, “likes” or Skypes during business hours, a bit of good news: your social media accounts might not be damaging your work performance as much as your boss thinks. In fact, according to two pieces of new research, your social media involvement might actually be helping your productivity.
Yes, that’s right: Tuesday’s Twitter-induced (temporary) market crash aside, social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn and even Twitter aren’t entirely bad for your career. Consider Exhibit A, which comes from data analytics firm Evolv. They surveyed over 39,000 call center employees and found that those who use between one and four social networks have longer tenures at their jobs; a second survey of nearly 5,000 employees found that those who belong to five social networks or more have higher sales conversions than employees who aren’t as socially connected.
Evolv managing director Dr. Mike Housman was careful to note that they don’t yet know why this correlation exists, though he has a few hypotheses. “There’s a component of these results that people are more tech-savvy, more computer proficient,” he said. “People who are more technically proficient, do better. It’s also a measure of how socially engaged you are within the internet. That social engagement probably links to [job] engagement and being able to sell products.”
Now, these results do not mean the Facebook-resistant need to suddenly create accounts for the sake of their job, or that pinning pictures of pot roasts means a better annual review. Instead, Housman said that what’s important is to focus on how you interact with technology as a whole. “I would argue that more computer usage is a good thing. If you’re more interactive — using Outlook, Word, Excel — being familiar with computers is a good thing,” he said. “I don’t think the takeaway is ‘join five sites.’”
Joe Nandhakumar, professor of information systems at the University of Warwick in the U.K, recently published similar findings January’s Information Systems Journal. After studying managers and analysts working at a global telecommunications firm in Finland, Germany and the U.K, he found that integrating social media functions — like instant messaging and chatting on Skype — with work can help foster collaboration and faster results.
“What we observed was that many users saw the emerging social media platform as providing a sense of awareness of others who are digitally connected and able to work together differently, often more effectively,” Nandhakumar said in an email. “For example, when they need to provide certain solutions to customers’ specific needs, design engineers from different locations used the social media capabilities… to interact and discuss ways of effectively configuring products — this was previously not possible.”
Nandhakumar said that, in the workers he observed, social media not only improved task completion but helped make their work “more people-centered and interaction-oriented,” rather than just transaction-focused. In other words, social media helped the workers become more social — in a good way.
“Digital connectivity through the use of social media in work settings seems to be helping ‘regular people’ at work rather than disrupting their work,” he said. “Management should adopt policies that encourage the use of such social media technologies for the serving of organizational goals — social media could afford workers much greater latitude and control over their timing and location of their work.”
Evolv’s Housman had a similar message to employers and upper management. “We think it’s really interesting that people who are using a different number of social networks stay longer, perform better. Don’t dismiss these people out of hand when they may be perfectly good, if not better, employees.”
