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Electrons are buzzing today about the CISCO 2010 Midyear Security Report, which states that seven percent of the people who access Facebook at work spend more than an hour a day playing FarmVille, Mafia Wars and similar games.

Social media policies have their place to protect the legitimate interests of businesses, but I have to agree wholeheartedly with David B. Thomas of SAS, who sees this as a performance management problem rather than a social media policy problem:

This is not trivial. This is not insignificant. Social media can be a productivity drain. But so can the Web. So can the phone. So can talking to co-workers. So can… air. Chairs. Doors. I once saw a co-worker at a previous job sit in her chair, handbag on her lap, and stare into space from 4:45 until 5:00, then get up and go home.

If people don’t want to work, are bored with their jobs, don’t understand their contribution to the organization, how it affects the bottom line and why it’s in their best interest to do their jobs well, they will zone out. The way they choose to zone out is not the issue.

If your employees are averaging 68 minutes a day on FarmVille, you don’t have a social media problem. You have a performance management problem.

What do you think?

Tags: CISCO, Facebook, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, midyear security report, performance management, SAS, social media, social media policy, Zynga

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Corporate management, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.