Ben Betts is…

1.a. If at any time during your working day you find yourself with a free moment, it is company policy that you MUST logon to your favourite social network and have a play about. Do this until more work arrives. No exceptions.

I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the attitudes of a wide-range of people when it comes to accessing websites like Facebook at work. Forgive me for incessantly saying Facebook – interchange it for your favourite social network if it makes you feel better – but it is the most popular.

Andrew McAfee, speaking at the DevLearn 09 conference yesterday*, commented that we need to stop jumping on the risks associated with Web 2.0. Currently, in order to get close to any of the benefits that a website like Facebook could provide your company, you first have to jump over all of the associated ‘risks’ that get thrown at you. It’s nearly impossible to do this and even if you do succeed it will be a watered down and caveat-filled experience. Why?

It’s a mindset, one of a previous generation.

Recent UK figures have shown nearly 2.5 million people are out of work in this country. There is significant evidence that being unemployed long-term has severely detrimental effects on both family life and health. People are generally happier when they are in employment. So, reading between the lines here, we all have an inherent will to work. We go into the world of work essentially happy. Then work breaks us down, infringing on the liberties which we take for granted outside of the workplace, for no other reason than to mitigate risk. This sucks.

Eschew risk, embrace opportunity; what’s the worst that could happen?

Browsing social networks is just one liberty that the next generation of worker is going to be denied by most organisations they go to work for. Access to Facebook might not make you happier, but blocking it will almost certainly make you less happy. Social Networks are rapidly becoming a hygiene factor in the minds of new Gen Y workers.

So then let’s look to embrace the opportunity that providing access to Facebook will give us. I’m going to go beyond the normally recognised benefits (of which there are many) and move the discussion to one key area of objection: Time-wasting. If we allow workers access to Facebook they are doing personal stuff on business time and this is wasteful. Yep, I think even I can agree with that.

But let me ask you this; how are you currently measuring employee waste in your organisation? The principles of Lean operations are present in many organisations throughout the world (and many more are paying millions to develop such ideas). The central pillar of this initiative is the cutting out of waste. Some waste is easy to identify. Some waste cannot be avoided. Other waste is difficult to track, like the amount of time a worker involved in a process is not fully utilised. So then, let’s turn the tables on the software packages which track websites visited and time spent. I refer you back to my new policy:

If at any time during your working day you find yourself with a free moment, it is company policy that you MUST logon to your favourite social network and have a play about.

So we insist people use social networks and then we track usage levels to use as Management Information, tracking waste. At the same time as offering great quantitative information with regards to the amount of waste and the times at which it occurs, this system also offers a great visual aid to waste on the shop floor. If you’ve got Facebook open you’re not being utilised. How easy is that from a Line Managers point of view? What a fantastic measure of waste that would be.

Stop evaluating Web 2.0 tools from a risk point of view and start evaluating the opportunities.

*By the way, I did not attend DevLearn 09, all I had to do was follow the Twitter hashtag for a running commentary on McAfee’s keynote.