An April 2009 research article Non-work related computing (NWRC) in Communications of the ACM asked the following questions:

How does time spent engaging in NWRC activities affect job performance?  Does NWRC have either a positive or negative effect on job performance?

One school of thought is that NWRC has  negative effects on the company in terms of costs incurred by loss of productivity and by risk of litigation from downloading copyrighted materials.  Another takes a different view, believing that online personal activities make workers happier and more productive, much like the water coolers chats of the past.  Additionally, while the activity may not be directly work related, it may lead to learning something than can be used to the company’s benefit in the future.

One of the study’s findings demonstrated that there is indeed a decrease in productivity with NWRC, in particular due to the interruptive nature of emails and instant messages, and that it took workers on average 64 seconds to return to the same rate of work they had been maintaining prior to the interruption.  Considering the frequency with which these messages can be received, the time it takes to attend to the message and the additional 64 seconds per message that it takes to return to the pre-interruption work level, that can be a lot of time wasted.  That can really be cause for concern in our do-more-with-less environment.

Setting controls through the IT department won’t work anymore, given the ubiquity of personal cell phones with text messaging and Facebook aps.  Considering our increasing social connectedness, particularly among the new generation of workers, is productivity going to be more of a problem for managers going forward?

You Are How You Brand, in Communications World July-August 2006, discussed a Yahoo! Hot-Jobs survey that found that 90% of people looking for jobs online considered it important to be able to support the brand and products, more than 94% must closely understand and believe in what the company does, 93% consider it important to support a company’s values, and 90% must closely understand the value (to themselves) of working for the company. 

As managers we need to understand, support and communicate the employer brand.  We need to do it to attract the right talent during the hiring process.  Once they’re hired, we need to do it to reinforce their choice and meet their expectations of us.  A brand that your employees believe in gives them a sense of pride, and encourages them to deliver exceptional service to your customers.

What is your company’s employer brand, and how do you support it?

Despite the fact that the workplace would seem to provide opportunities for social connection, it doesn’t seem to be the case.  The article’s authors Rafael Gely and Leonard Bierman, point to several factors, including outsourcing, tenuous employment, and potential for harassment claims. 

What do we do?  We blog. 

Blogging helps us connect with other like-minded individuals “where the voices of employees can be heard at a very low cost, unimpeded by the hierarchical barriers present at work.”

Do you think the article’s authors are correct – do you feel isolated in your work environment?  And has your blog help you feel more connected?

The post concerns professionals who use social media to promote their business, and drawing the line between personal opinion and professional personality.  The person described in the post used his business’s official Facebook page to criticize someone else’s work — personal opinion that had no business on the business page.  The result?  The target of the criticism happened to be a fan of the page and was understandably upset by the comments.  The author of the post draws a distinction between social media and personal soapbox, and summed it up nicely in this comment:

The lesson we can take from this is to not fall in the trap of blurring the line between personal social networking and professional social media. Particularly for self-employed and sole traders, the greater your investment in social media the greater your personal actions impact on your brand. At that end of the scale, your brand is not defined by your marketing campaigns but by you, your personality and behaviour.

When we associate ourselves with our company either in the content of our posts or by our personal profiles, we in effect become representatives of our company.  We are then blurring the lines between our personal social networking and professional social media.  What are you saying about your company?

The article was an interesting read, and it got me thinking.  How do you manage a staff of both human and non-human workers?  Would I not be expected to evaluate the robot’s effectiveness in performing the task?  If the robot is replacing a human, how would I manage the resentment of its coworkers?  Would they be worried about being replaced themselves?  Or would they accept their new colleage?

Talk about a diversity issue.

One of the benefits noted by a CEO was the old cliche:  robots don’t take breaks, they don’t take vacations, and you don’t have to pay them benefits.  This may have been tongue-in-cheek, but I think this reinforces the fears and resentment that workers may feel towards robots, especially in this environment where many workers are afraid to call out sick or take time off lest their employer see them as dispensable.  The CEO’s comment is also demeaning, as if his workers are nothing more than machines.  It certainly does nothing for morale. 

How do you keep your staff motivated and confident in the face of a perceived threat – a new process, a new cowoker, or even a new machine (not necessarily a robot) that upsets the status quo?

The challenge, especially in non-profits, seems to me to be that the things that motivate a person (or that a person says in an interview) to apply for/take a job may be quite different than what motivates a person to continue to perform at a high level after they’ve been in that job for 2, 3, 5, 10 years.  (Full post here.)

I don’t know that I would trust someone’s answer to that question during an interview.  Are they telling me what they truly believe, or what they believe I want to hear?  As the writer comments, what motivates a person at the start of their tenure with a company is not necessarily the same several years down the road.

As managers, it’s our responsibility to find out from our staff what motivates them.  Do we have that discussion only during an annual review?  I’m guilty of that, but I’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to yield a heartfelt answer.  It may be too formal of a setting, where I think my staff are just focused on hearing the results of their performance evaluations rather than on discussing what they’d like to get out of their jobs. 

This article, Basics About Employee Motivation  in the Free Management Library offers some good common sense tips, as well as dispels some of the myths, about employee motivation.

I’d be interested to know — what has worked for you as a manager, or as a subordinate?

But what if your not-well-thought-out upload affects your company’s reputation?  Here’s a humorous example from Chad Richards’ post on his blog Social Media Today:

Recently while browsing around MySpace, we saw photos of the marketing director of a company we’ve done some work with.  Normally, that wouldn’t be something worth writing about, except these photos were photos of the person in his underwear on a table dancing at a party.  Now the point of my post is not that this behavior is inappropriate – but posting it on a social media network is a risk for the individual’s reputation and his employer’s reputation (not to mention it’s hard to be in a meeting with someone like this, and keep a straight face) when you’ve seen the picture.  (read the rest here.)

 Companies, realizing the damage that employees can do when unleashed onto social media without clear guidelines, are beginning to institute policies about what can and cannot be posted in the company’s name.  However, what can the company do in a situation like the one above?  What if your personal posts are connected to your company either by those who know you or by information you reveal in your profile?  Does the company have the right to censor your personal information in an effort to preserve its corporate image and reputation?

It seemed to me that Sanyo has good intentions, but the wiki doesn’t seem to have much purpose.  What’s the point of collaborating when there’s no goal – what are you collaborating on?  And other than the free lab timer, there’s no incentive.  How would you refocus Sanyo’s wiki to turn it into an active online community that would appeal to IVF researchers?

That sounds like a great idea (albeit a Wikipedia ripoff).  However, I found my company, as well as our competitors, had a Community Page, some already with content and linked to Facebook members, and I was immediately concerned.  First of all, the obvious:  my company is a brand and should have its own page if we decide that we want to create one on Facebook.  Secondly, how did our profile get there?  Did Facebook take my search term and generate a page based on that, thinking that it was term that the larger Facebook community would like to expand?  Third, do I want our employees’ Facebook pages linked to our company’s Community Page?  Our employees should have that choice (and I believe they do if I understand Facebook’s policy correctly), but what if they make that link and they have objectionable content on their page? (See Marie’s blog for a related post on Coworkers and Social Media.)

Certainly, anyone can write what they think about our company on their website or blog.  We can write something ourselves and invite our customers to comment.  That’s the new way of the web.  But in these cases we put the information out to the public, and it is either challenged or supported.  The Community Pages contains information that Facbook gathered.  In this case Facebook use the Wikipedia entry we posted, but I don’t know what other sources Facebook and the members they encourage to contribute will use.  I don’t know if they’re valid and up to date.  And yet it appears that it is something that my company posted.

It seems that in this collaborative online world, companies are losing control over their own identities.  Is this a problem that has always been around?  Am I overly concerned?  Am I on to a good topic for a my paper?