The effects of social networking in the workplace
ABSTRACT
Purpose – This paper aims to examine the impact of social networking in the workplace and to assess its application as an productive company tool.
Style/methodology/method– The paper evaluates positive perceptions of social networking in the workplace which increases employee satisfaction and employee productivity and this will undoubtedly lead to increased brand reputation for corporations. This paper also scientific studies the factors why some organizations ban and restrict social networking in the workplace and its negative outcomes. Moreover the link in between social networking and organizational culture is estimated. The findings are expected to show the usage of social networking in a workplace which has started becoming applied by some organizations in most countries would benefit their company.
Keywords: Social networks, Workplace, Employee productivity and satisfaction, Business achievement
Paper form: Literature evaluation
Introduction
In recent years, the Online and specially the Net has authorized a communication revolution: the ability to send and recover facts everywhere has changed the way we work and reside. Social networking portals are a new movement. Social networking is based on this theory that there is a determinable construction to how persons know every single other, whether or not directly or indirectly (Rob Cross and Andrew Parker 2004).
A social networking web page (SNS) connects and links people today based on information and facts gathered about them, as saved in their user profiles. These user profiles choose the way in which users are able to present themselves to other individuals. The most substantial distinguishing element in between the different websites is the range of profile data that they shop and can carry out operations on.
The use of social networking sites (SNS), which presented commercially about a decade ago, is now well established amongst the common population. By late 2008, MySpace and Facebook each and every had 60 million U.S. users and according to a recent Comscore estimate they have alot more than 100 million users each and every. Though some of these web-sites were initially directed at younger users such as college students, recently SNSs have been attracting substantial numbers of older audiences interested in expert networking. Use of SNSs like Facebook is also becoming even more observable inside organizations, especially among younger staff and recent hires that joined the site as college students.
The virtual workplace
The recent years we have witnessed an atomization and redistribution of operating designs and patterns. Hotels, cafes, bars, trains, and airport terminals are becoming much more and far more utilized as areas of function. We are now living in an information and facts age exactly where function is becoming redefined beyond traditional bounds of space and time (McGregor, 2000a).
Though technologies has eased additional distributed methods of working, it can also, by means of the use of social networking, facilitate the human wants that are necessary for distributed ways of operating to succeed. Technologies has blurred the conventional distinctions among function environments and buildings and many businesses have increasingly adopted a virtual approach to workspace (Igbaria and Guimaraes, 1999 Kayworth and Leidner, 2000). In specific, certifying team spirit and culture is maintained no matter exactly where you are in the globe. These days function can implement anyplace. So the workplace rather than becoming a place exactly where individuals just come to perform, is now increasingly becoming a chance for people today to indicate private involvement in organizational culture and to participate in the values and beliefs of the organization (Bell et al., 2008).
What makes social networking exclusive is that the manage of on-line content moves from the web site owner to the contributor of material to the websites. In other words, organizations that have executed social networking have skilled a shift in culture from "information gathering" to "details participation". One could compete as a result, that social networking can allow virtual workers to function significantly more and a lot more successfully through improved collaboration and communication as well as offering loaded of particular details and individual facts about contacts which can be updated immediately, when people transform jobs, departments or offices. All of these practices are easy to implement and decreased expenses. But in some situations whenever workers who are mainly absent from the office for long periods of time, it becomes increasingly tough to immerse themselves in organizational culture.
Social networking web sites, yet, supply probabilities for each formal and informal interaction and cooperation with fellow staff and clients/clients who aids expertise transfer and communication. The sites also have diverse informal applications and games that members of the identical organization can participate in across geographical boundaries and time zones, so that team spirit and organizational culture can be maintained. Akkirman and Harris (2005) revealed the truth of the most frequently expressed attention about virtual spaces is that old structure of social mechanics that facilitate communication are lost. Throughout their research, they studied a provider that implemented lots of social networking tactics to keep the virtual workers in the communication loop. Amongst these were socially engaging approaches like the e-cafe´, the virtual location where employees could be pleased with chat-rooms, reading e-Bulletin Boards, posting, playing chess at lunch time and reading newspapers or magazines. Even so in their study, Akkirman and Harris (2005) identified that suppliers can achieve benefits beyond enhanced productivity and price shifting by means of implementing the above mentioned communication approaches. They became aware of employee satisfaction and related variables such as motivation and turnover can strengthen as nicely in other words they have direct relationship (Akkirman and Harris, 2005).
Back ground of Social Networking
The original concept of social circles was established by Georg Simmel (Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, 2004) by the 20th century. Since this 1st theory, the discipline has been developed to be used, for instance by modern day computer system technologies, to authorize social science to do big scientific studies on all sorts of social networks. The major purpose is to map social relations and to look for variables, which will at some point guide to a better comprehension of how relations function, information flows and organizations cooperate.
Social interaction was created in early terminal-based computers. The present period of social networking began as Net performance increased and the Web took hold. From 1995 to 1997, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger had been released. (Meredith M. Skeels, Jonathan Grudin 2009) , use of commercial phone-based text messaging rose, text messaging internet portals developed, and Classmates.com and Six Degrees appeared. Messaging brought the buddy lists and widespread, quasi-real-time communication that are a foundation on which social networking software program builds. Mobile phone use and text-messaging also improved the consumer space, particularly to young customers. (Meredith M. Skeels, Jonathan Grudin 2009).
Even though lots of newer web sites with a social networking component have thrived (e.g., Flickr, YouTube, Twitter), the dominance of older web pages suggests that the timing was necessary. From 2002-2004, Plaxo, Friendster, Reunion.com, Cyworld, LinkedIn, Hi5, Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, and Live Spaces had been released or actively advanced. (Meredith M. Skeels, Jonathan Grudin 2009).
Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Classmates, Reunion.com and Live Spaces were the six most active US web sites in 2005. (Meredith M. Skeels, Jonathan Grudin 2009). Apparently other web pages are well identified somewhere else (Friendster in Asia, Cyworld in Korea, Hi5 in Spanish-speaking countries, QQ in China, Orkut in Brazil and India). These web-sites generally recommend some ways for users to communicate and interact with every single other within sending e-mail, instant messaging, webcams, chat rooms, blogging and discussion groups file sharing. These web-sites usually deliver a number of techniques for users to interact and communicate with each other such as instant messaging, chat rooms, e-mail, webcams, file sharing, blogging and discussion groups (Bell et al., 2008).
