More Experiences from The Conference Board Meeting
Here is an interesting experience shared by one of the attendees at the same conference. The person represented a respected foods and beverages company and also talked about the restriction on social media usage in their corporate office. He talked about how a senior product manager, who was required to comment on a blog about their product, had to rush to the nearest Starbucks outlet to access the social media website since it was inaccessible from within their corporate network.
Another participant made an observation about how people were using their high end mobile phones (yes including the iPhone) to access social media websites at the office since their corporate policies for internet access restricted them from visiting those websites.
Another experience, though not exactly discussed at the conference, is closer home. A friend, who works at a leading IT services company, with restrictive internet access policies, identified several alternatives to bypass the proxy servers to access social media websites. Now while this is much more dangerous than it sounds, the fact remains that restrictions always pave the way for innovations.
Quick response to Shaurabh’s comment on the previous post. While the companies listed in Shaurabh’s comments are leaders in their respective fields, the other commonality is that they also have a major stake in the development / usage of the new web. In fact some of these are at the forefront of technologies leading to the new WWW experience. So it is not surprising to see these companies taking the lead.
The companies I was referring to in the earlier post are large, brick and mortar giants, who have been in business for several decades and are yet to catch up with the changes in their consumer’s preferences. Infact some of the companies might be dealing exclusively with customers who may not have been affected by the changes in the WWW experience. These customers always had experiences created for them due their exclusivity.
But the point about not waiting for the small startups to provide the answers to problems about security and business models is valid. Companies like Progressive (Insurance), Wells Fargo (Financial Services) and BBC (media) have already taken the lead in adopting the next generation of Web and how?
Comments
With OperaMini the entry barrier for mobile internet has really come down. With just a java enabled phone you can surf from anywhere. Of course iphone/e61i gives you better rendering and usability.
Problem with blocking is we are trying to solve the moral problem with technology which might not work.
Posted by: Thejesh GN | June 12, 2008 11:03 AM
Yes. Forcing productivity may not yield expected results. As Chanakya once said, you can not keep a fish in water and expect it not to drink water...
I believe it will be better for the companies to give some flexbility to their employees, as long as they do not compromise with their primary job responsibilities.
Posted by: Shrinidhi Hande | June 12, 2008 3:09 PM
Srinidhi, your suggestion of flexible access to some employees is interesting and probably being followed in some organisations already. But the question is what conditions must an employee fulfil before she or he is allowed to access social network websites?
Some commonly used pre-conditions are role based access control, tenancy or length of service in an organisation, nature of work, and age group of the user. Of course these are not necessarily good proxies for the desired quality of 'responsible behaviour'.
The situation is indeed paradoxical in a way that the younger generation, active on multiple social networks, will always get excluded from network access if any of the aforementioned conditions are considered. On the other hand people who will be eligible for access won't be the most active users of such social networks.
A more pragmatic approach would be to allow access to all during non-peak / non-office hours such that both network bandwidth as well as productivity concerns can be managed. Of course a realistic approach would be to monitor excessive usage by few and, after duly warning these offenders, restrict their access.
Posted by: Ajay Kolhatkar | June 13, 2008 4:25 PM
Yes. Devising a mechanism to achieve that can be tricky.
As you said, allowing unrestricted browsing before and after office hours can be a good idea.
Another option will be, mainly to younger employees who love to use banned sites extensively, could be to reward certain number of “unrestricted browsing hours” after successful completion of every milestone. If an employee delivers his work ahead of deadline, in desired quality and quantity, his manager can reward him, say x hours every week, which he can use for personal browsing. This can in fact add to productivity as employees strive to deliver better and earlier in exchange for these few hours. This should go well with an organization’s policy-if company is happy with the work of an employee, then let employee be granted few privileges so that his satisfaction is retained.
Also there are few tasks which can’t be done after office hours (online trading, for example). If such sites are blocked, dissatisfaction of an employee who trades once a while will be at its peak.
In most of the cases I feel it will be better to let employee spend few minutes on his personal work and then focus on office work- Consider this example: A guy gets an SMS from a girl saying she has written an orkut scrap. If this guy can’t check the scrap right then, whole day he will be under an anxiety as to what she might have written. This may not allow him to focus on the work. Instead if he could check and respond to it, rest of the day he’ll be in a cheerful mood (assuming the message was positive. Downside is that if the scrap had a negative message he might stay depressed for rest of the day)
What do you think about these?
Thanks.
Posted by: Shrinidhi Hande | June 20, 2008 10:57 AM
I had heard "rules are meant to be broken" and my take is that the more policies you have, the more people think about breaking them. Have less rules and possibly people will remain focused on their work than try to find out means to work around.
That said, we are all professionals and it would be wrong to say that we don't understand our professional obligations. There will be a select few who probably want to missuse the access and it would be far easier to track these, catch and appropriately punish these, than create restrictions for all.
Posted by: Atul Gupta | August 15, 2008 8:47 AM