Focus on Facebook
With an estimated 360 million Facebook users worldwide, it appears that social
networking sites are becoming ever more popular. The potential problems they can cause for businesses, however, mean they are not so
popular with employers. How can employers tackle these issues?
Some employees are spending excessive amounts of time during their working hours accessing social networking sites. This can be very costly for employers in terms of productivity, and could potentially amount to a disciplinary offence. It is, therefore, important for employers to have a clearly-worded policy informing employees what is and is not acceptable use of the Internet and social networking sites. Additionally, employees must be informed that their Internet usage may be monitored. Employers can decide whether or not to impose a complete Internet ban for non work-related purposes or to restrict access to break times only. Such policies must be enforced uniformly.