Written by Condon Associates on 10 August 2009

A recent article in the Financial Review raised the issue of how employers were trying to come to grips with the time that employees spend using social networking sites during work hours.

For some employers it has been simple — they have taken the bull by the horns and simply restricted access to the sites or only made them available during a certain time periods each day (usually lunch time).

However for those employers allowing their staff to have free reign when it comes to accessing the internet, it has been reported that staff are spending as much as 40% of their time aimlessly visiting sites like Twitter or Facebook.

The fundamentals of this whole issue are that this is really not something that can be tolerated or accepted. If an employee was to add 40% to the price of a product with the intent to pocket it for their own gain there would be hell to pay. The words fraud, con artist or some other relevant unpleasantry immediately spring to mind.

Therefore companies need to take decisive steps to prevent their employees from wasting time on non income producing activities (albeit time is effectively included into the product or services retail value).

Those businesses that want to be fair to their customers as well as ALL of their employees will take significant steps to control the problem, either by restricting access completely or only allowing it for a specified time throughout the day.

However those companies who allow staff free reign are far more likely to run into financial problems later on. This is because their competitors who restrict internet access will be able to get the most out of their staff during business hours, rather than having them waste time and money on staff that spend a large proportion of their time updating their social networking status.

From an OH&S and Human Resources perspective, a variety of psychologists have also raised serious concerns relating to the long term impact that such sites are having on the current generation of youth.

Finally, there are also the possible ramifications of liability for the business that may arise from one employee making an untoward or inappropriate comment about someone else (employee or not).

I can quite easily go on but it certainly appears easier and safer to simply get rid of social networking from the office altogether!