Social media is all pervasive, and there is no doubt about it. You can hardly restrict your employees from using social media at workplace. Even business managers themselves often fall prey to the lure of Facebook posts. In fact, restricting or completely stopping the use of social media at workplace is not always desirable.
Nevertheless, the use of social media needs to be regulated. To do that, you need to weigh social media in the workplace, pros and cons.
In fact, there are both pros and cons of social media at work. Business managers need to maintain a fine balance between entertainment for more productivity and addiction.
Let’s discuss it.
Pros Of Using Social Media At Workplace
The advantages of using social media at workplace are:
Engagement With Management
In the physical world, it is rarely possible for business managers to engage with all employees, especially the lower rung ones. The opposite is also true. Social media has handed over this opportunity to both the management and the employees. Now everybody can engage with everyone else in the common place, called social media.
Staying Updated
Social media lets you share not only text, but videos, chats, images and charts, too. As business managers, team leaders or HR managers post about a recent achievement of the organization, all employees are able to share it. Thus they can stay updated about such stuff, and feel proud to share.
Analyzing Organizational Performance
Social media is now ingrained with artificial intelligence and data analysis tools. It can pull all the data from an organization and analyze it to come up with a picture of the actual state of things. Statistics are very helpful in gauging the stage of affairs and social media can do this aptly. This can be used to analyze the feelings of employees towards the organization, mood of the employees in general, as well as general opinion of outside world about the organization.
Making People Aware of Your Existence
People now get to know about companies, products and services through social media. If employees spend some time in the social media, people in their friend list or their followers get to know about their jobs, roles, businesses and companies.
Cons Of Using Social Media At Workplace
The disadvantages of using social media at workplace are:
Brings Down Productivity
Spending too much time in social media or being addicted to social media has its own demerits. People lose track of their work and their attention is diverted to Facebook posts and other social media attractions. This may bring down productivity.
Increases The Risk Of Losing Privacy
Employees, especially women employees, are often at the receiving end of unsolicited messages, threats and morphed images of themselves over social media. The risk of losing privacy is innate to spending time and sharing information over social media. Stalking is a real risk that people may fall prey to, if they spend too much time in social media. A stalker can be someone from within the organization or outside. Irrespective of that, what is at stake is privacy.
Breeding Jealousy
Bragging about materialistic possessions is innate to some. Social media has lent credence to them. Whether it is a new house, a new piece of jewelry or a new vehicle, these people post and share these images with impunity. This has the potential to breed jealousy among colleagues. This can even bring down productivity of employees and therefore the performance of the organization.
Conclusion
There are both pros and cons of social media at work. You need to make sure that social media in the workplace pros and cons are balanced and regulated.
