NO Facebook For Council Staff

Facebook seems to be posing a big problem at work. According to BBC, a council found out that staff was spending an average of 400 hours on it every month. This figure definitely did not please the council and a ban of Facebook from its computers will be put in place soon.

From the data, each staff spent on average 6 minutes a day on the popular social networking site; but whether they had been accessing Facebook during actual working hours is unknown. They could be Facebook-ing during breaks or before or after work, which was allowed by the council previously.

Voice of the Stakeholders

David Williams, chief executive of Portsmouth City Council revealed: “We regularly revise our position on this as the internet environment is constantly changing.

We revised the policy in July to facilitate work life balance and allow things like internet banking in staff’s own time but we intend to restrict internet access to social networking sites more than at present for non-business use.

Any member of staff may, under this revised policy, make a business case to have these sites unblocked if they need to use them for council business.”

The Taxpayers’ Alliance sided the move, saying its a “waste of public cash”.

Mark Wallace, from the group commented:

“It is sad that it has reached a point where councils need to ban staff from Facebook. But people are employed to work hard for the taxpayer and this is clearly a waste of public money.”

Improve Productivity?

Many of us spend most of our time working in an office and we all know how hard it is to maintain 100% concentration at work. We all need some time to take our mind off the heavy workload and Facebook has played a big part in helping us do that.

But how much is too much?

Could banning Facebook pose an adverse effect on our productivity instead?

One thing is for sure, Facebook addicts definitely have ways to access the social site if they want to. Even a prisoner managed to access Facebook through a smuggled in mobile phone. They can’t be banning the use of mobile phones at work too, can they?