The effects of social networking in the workplace
ABSTRACT
Objective – This paper aims to examine the impact of social networking in the workplace and to assess its application as an useful organization tool.
Style/methodology/strategy– The paper evaluates positive perceptions of social networking in the workplace which increases employee satisfaction and employee productivity and this will undoubtedly lead to improved brand reputation for organizations. This paper also research the causes why some organizations ban and restrict social networking in the workplace and its unfavorable 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 getting applied by some organizations in most nations would benefit their business enterprise.
Keywords: Social networks, Workplace, Employee productivity and satisfaction, Enterprise success
Paper sort: Literature critique
Introduction
In current years, the World wide web and specially the Web has authorized a communication revolution: the capability to send and recover material everywhere has altered the way we function and live. Social networking portals are a new motion. Social networking is based on this theory that there is a determinable construction to how people know every other, no matter if directly or indirectly (Rob Cross and Andrew Parker 2004).
A social networking site (SNS) connects and links men and women based on specifics gathered about them, as saved in their user profiles. These user profiles choose the way in which users are able to present themselves to others. The most important distinguishing element amongst the a number of web pages is the range of profile data that they shop and can carry out operations on.
The use of social networking web pages (SNS), which presented commercially about a decade ago, is now well established among the general 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 a great deal more than 100 million users each. Although some of these web sites were initially directed at younger users such as college students, lately SNSs have been attracting sizeable numbers of older audiences interested in qualified networking. Use of SNSs like Facebook is also becoming significantly more observable within organizations, particularly amongst younger employees and latest hires that joined the webpage as college students.
The virtual workplace
The latest years we have witnessed an atomization and redistribution of operating designs and patterns. Hotels, cafes, bars, trains, and airport terminals are becoming far more and far more utilized as places of perform. We are now living in an information age exactly where perform is becoming redefined beyond traditional bounds of space and time (McGregor, 2000a).
Though technology has eased a lot more distributed strategies of operating, it can also, via the use of social networking, facilitate the human needs that are necessary for distributed techniques of working to be successful. Technology has blurred the conventional distinctions between work environments and buildings and a lot of organizations have increasingly adopted a virtual method to workspace (Igbaria and Guimaraes, 1999 Kayworth and Leidner, 2000). In particular, certifying team spirit and culture is maintained no matter exactly where you are in the globe. These days work can implement anyplace. So the workplace rather than being a spot where people just come to work, is now increasingly becoming a chance for men and women to indicate private involvement in organizational culture and to participate in the values and beliefs of the organization (Bell et al., 2008).
What tends to make social networking special is that the control of web based content material moves from the web-site owner to the contributor of material to the internet sites. In other words, organizations that have executed social networking have experienced a shift in culture from "information gathering" to "knowledge participation". 1 could compete hence, that social networking can allow virtual workers to work much more and far more properly via elevated collaboration and communication as nicely as offering loaded of distinct particulars and private knowledge about contacts which can be updated right away, when people today transform jobs, departments or offices. All of these practices are simple to implement and reduced fees. But in some instances whenever workers who are mainly absent from the workplace for lengthy periods of time, it becomes increasingly troublesome to immerse themselves in organizational culture.
Social networking internet sites, nonetheless, provide odds for both formal and informal interaction and cooperation with fellow employees and customers/shoppers who aids knowledge transfer and communication. The internet sites also have completely different informal applications and games that members of the same 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 reality of the most regularly expressed attention about virtual spaces is that old structure of social mechanics that facilitate communication are lost. During their investigation, they studied a organization that implemented lots of social networking techniques to maintain the virtual workers in the communication loop. Amongst these had been socially engaging approaches like the e-cafe´, the virtual location where employees could be content with chat-rooms, reading e-Bulletin Boards, posting, playing chess at lunch time and reading newspapers or magazines. Yet in their study, Akkirman and Harris (2005) found that companies can accomplish benefits beyond enhanced productivity and expense shifting by way of implementing the above mentioned communication approaches. They became aware of employee satisfaction and connected variables such as motivation and turnover can increase as nicely in other words they have direct relationship (Akkirman and Harris, 2005).
Back ground of Social Networking
The original idea of social circles was established by Georg Simmel (Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, 2004) by the 20th century. Due to the fact this 1st theory, the discipline has been developed to be made use of, for instance by present day pc technologies, to authorize social science to do big scientific studies on all sorts of social networks. The principal purpose is to map social relations and to appear for variables, which will at some point guide to a improved comprehension of how relations work, facts flows and organizations cooperate.
Social interaction was produced in early terminal-based computers. The existing period of social networking began as Internet performance improved and the Internet took hold. From 1995 to 1997, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger had been released. (Meredith M. Skeels, Jonathan Grudin 2009) , use of commercial telephone-based text messaging rose, text messaging internet portals developed, and Classmates.com and Six Degrees appeared. Messaging brought the buddy lists and popular, quasi-actual-time communication that are a foundation on which social networking computer software builds. Mobile phone use and text-messaging also increased the consumer space, specifically to young customers. (Meredith M. Skeels, Jonathan Grudin 2009).
Though lots of newer internet sites with a social networking component have thrived (e.g., Flickr, YouTube, Twitter), the dominance of older websites 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 Reside Spaces had been the six most active US sites in 2005. (Meredith M. Skeels, Jonathan Grudin 2009). Apparently other web sites are nicely known someplace else (Friendster in Asia, Cyworld in Korea, Hi5 in Spanish-speaking countries, QQ in China, Orkut in Brazil and India). These web pages usually recommend some methods for users to communicate and interact with each and every other inside sending e-mail, instant messaging, webcams, chat rooms, blogging and discussion groups file sharing. These websites commonly give a number of approaches for users to interact and communicate with every other such as instant messaging, chat rooms, e-mail, webcams, file sharing, blogging and discussion groups (Bell et al., 2008).
