Social Media & Distractions at Work

Source: Mashable
Date: September 24, 2012
Link: How Social Media Distracts You at Work

I was reading Mashable earlier today and came across the above article about the impact social media and social-media related sites have on worker productivity. The article, if you couldn't already tell from the title, highlights how much time is spent on average by workers looking at social media sites during work hours. According to the findings of Red e App, a mobile communication platform that enables organizations to communicate messages to their employees or customers through their phones, and Microsoft, workers are interrupted once every 10.5 minutes and it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to an assigned task. And those interruptions can have a real impact on the overall American economy according to their research - costing almost $650 billion dollars a year. As part of their analysis, they created an interesting info-graphic highlighting their findings and even broke down usage of some of the most popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Email.

These numbers are staggering. Not so much how active Facebook, Twitter, and Email are on a daily basis, but rather the enormous amount of money lost from distractions during work hours. But I'm slightly skeptical of their conclusion for a couple reasons. First, while social media sites are new, distractions in the work place are not. Before the emergence of this new way to communicate with one another, I'm fairly confident there were other distractions causing a reduction in worker productivity that are no longer an issue e.g. having to write a letter by hand to communicate with others or having to use your phone each time you needed to speak with someone that were not nearby. Second, how do you know that visiting those social media sites were not indirectly improving their overall work production? What if you see something on Facebook that helps you complete something you are working on? Or what if you are using Twitter to get live updates from a specific conference that relates to your profession? While these may seem unlikely to some, they may actually be helping others work more efficiently and even improve the quality of their work in the end. Finally,
with the addition of work-issued mobile devices and devices to connect to your company's email/servers remotely, employees are being asked to worker more and longer than the traditional 9 - 5 workplace hours of years past. What this creates that may not necessarily be reflected in their findings is the increasing blur between the "workplace" and "home".

Maybe I'm making some unfair critiques of the article, but who knows. What I do know is that I spent about 5 minutes reading this article while I was sitting at my desk this afternoon at work. Please don't tell my employer how much that's going to cost them...