block facebook from employees?

[lanpi]

What is your opinion about this subject? There are a lot of stories about negative impact of facebook on productivity of workers and I'm thinking to block it in my company. What is the best way to do it?

[v2Media]

At the modem/router firewall. Most modern routers have stateful packet inspection and url filtering. Simply adding the fb & twitter urls to the firewall will block access. Savvy employees will have to use a proxy that encrypts urls to bypass the block.

[Chris Bates]

Implement an Internet usage policy that limits the use of Facebook, but doesn't deny it. Happy staff are more productive.

Ask people to limit their usage to before work hours, through lunch breaks, or after work hours. You'd be surprised that people will likely stick to the policy. Do you think that they wont just use Facebook on their phone if you deny it on their computer?

[White]

I agree with Chris. I worked for a major corporation where they have just "opened" their servers so all can use FB. Even the CEO is now on FB.

In the end they need to deliver certain outputs. This is what needs to be managed.

And as suggested, there are so many other avenues they can socially interact on their mobile phones.

It would be important to have policies in place....

[v2Media]

I disagree. FB is a dangerous place for company networks and employees cannot be trusted to limit their time, especially those with addictive personalities. I've recently invoiced a client for $7500 to clean up a network virus (rootkit) caught from a FB app. An employee unknowingly infected their own workstation and the virus propagated to the entire network. It took 2 technicians 2.5 days to clean up the network.

FB does not belong in the workplace and giving it access to a company network is a liability that can rack up a huge bill. Without exception, every client of mine loathes FB and the amount of time their employees spend on it. The only solution is to block access.

[kimto]

I agree with v2Media. Facebook can be very addictive and what with those who have addictive personalities!? Should they be paid for hanging out on facebook? Of course not!

What is the best way to do it?

If you have a system administrator then is the best way to do it on router, if not, you can use some software solutions. I block it in my company so it is accessible on breaks and I use this software (FB Limiter)

[Jason Didsman]

Unfortunately FB is here to stay in the work place. There is merit all round in this conversation. One employer I work with blocked Youtube due to bandwidth usage issues etc, however did not block FB.

I would suggest consider the age of your staff and ask them in a meeting how much they use it. Create a FB page for your business, pick someone from your company (if suitable) to run it, create a strategy with them on how you want to promote the business and go from there.
Get your staff involved a little, tell them you are watching, not as a means to keep an eye on them but ask them to consider public perception etc.

It may sound a little big brother, but hey you are paying them to work after all. Constituting the concept of before hours etc, rule of thumb on your own time, should be the best policy. The one or 2 abusers you may get, pull them a aside and talk with them directly if it is effecting their work too much.

Should people be paid to hang out on FB not really but if they are talking with your potential customers and can prove they are bringing you new business? Absolutely, you may have a potential super star in your business and didn't realize it, unlikely in most FB addicts but possible. Consider all the angles before chopping off the head of the snake.

[v2Media]

There's merit in paying employees to surf the web and blat their thoughts on FB? Sorry, but I see no advantage in paying an employee to spend personal time on anything when they're supposed to be working!

If the company uses a FB page to promote their services etc, that's a different story. But in my opinion, only employees with responsibilities for carrying out marketing actions on the FB page should have access, certainly not everyone. An on-line Community Manager for example...

The only compromise I would make is to have 1 or 2 computers in the common area of the office that has unrestricted access to the web and no access to the local network. If employees want to access FB, Twitter or fart-ass around on any other time-sink, they can do it on their breaks in the common area. It's bloody tuff being an employer, damned if I'd want hard earned revenue flushed down the proverbial FB dunny.

[robin]

Implement an Internet usage policy that limits the use of Facebook, but doesn't deny it. Happy staff are more productive.

Ask people to limit their usage to before work hours, through lunch breaks, or after work hours. You'd be surprised that people will likely stick to the policy. Do you think that they wont just use Facebook on their phone if you deny it on their computer?

I strongly agree with this based on my experience.

In my work environment, my employees are working online remotely on their own computers. Now, this is even harder to control than if we were all just in one office. I had to use a monitoring software like this one just to be able to get a glimpse of how they use their computers at work.

I noticed a great deal of time spent on Facebook for a number of them. I had to make a mandate to totally stop using Facebook during work hours. However, this seemed counter productive. I got a lot of negative comments which eventually made our productivity go down.

I realized I was just too hard on them. So, I had to lighten up a bit and allowed them to use Facebook any time they feel they need a refresh and break from work. I just constantly reminded them to use it responsibly. Amazingly, that worked. Every thing's all good now. A bit of Facebook and relaxation won't seem to hurt. It would even help your business.

[Linda Enever]

I agree with Chris keep it open and have a policy I was a troubleshooter for a large Recruitment firm and the first thing I used to do when taking over something was move all the restrictions and give my staff trust and informed responsibility. It worked more times than not and with the nots there was normally more issues than FB usage.

Hope that helps