Last week, SpamTitan issued a press release about its new social media cost calculator. The calculator was developed to help companies estimate the amount of man hours (and therefore money) they are losing as a result of employees accessing social media websites at work. The SpamTitan social media cost calculator has proved popular and attracted a great many online comments.
Calculating the true cost of social media site use by employees
In order to calculate the true cost of social media, SpamTitan took a close look at social media usage statistics. An average profile for a typical organization was created and data was extrapolated to provide an estimated annual cost.
The results of the calculations showed that a typical company loses approximately $65,000 every year as a result of employees spending time checking and posting information on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the myriad of other social media and social networking websites. SpamTitan calculated that the figure corresponds to 5% of every employee’s salary being wasted on personal social media use.
Many of the comments came from individuals who thought we were suggesting that all organizations should install a web filter and implement a company policy that bans the accessing of all social media sites at work. This was not our intention. There are advantages to allowing members of staff access to social media sites at work. There are also many disadvantages to banning access. Managers will be well aware that social media websites are being accessed by employees, and that employees spend a considerable amount of time those websites. What they perhaps do not know is how much time is spent, and how much this is costing them. That is information they need to know.
Should social media site access be banned at work?
Companies should make a decision about the use of social media at work. They will need to assess the benefits of allowing the staff some “Facetime”, and the disadvantages from the loss of access rights. There are also many legal considerations to consider and the accessing of these sites also raises a number of privacy and security concerns.
Many organizations may like to ban the accessing of the websites; but, in reality, doing so is complicated. It is not possible to implement a web filter that blocks all social networking and social media sites for everyone in the organization. The marketing department will need to access those websites. The IT department may do too for work purposes. A company-wide ban may not be realistic.
Some employees may only spend a few minutes a day on the sites, or may access them when they do not have work duties to complete. Some may only use the websites during coffee breaks. Should those individuals be banned from using the sites when it doesn’t impact on their work duties?
Something else worth considering, is whether it is better to allow staff to use their work computers to access the sites than have employees access them surreptitiously on their Smartphones. Is it better to be able to monitor use of the sites?
One of the most workable solutions is to put policies in place covering the use of social media websites and to instruct employees that the use of the sites must be kept to a minimum. If used in moderation, social media site usage need not result in a major cost to the business. However, it must be possible to control use of the sites and, for that, a web filter can be highly beneficial.
Provided that the chosen web filtering solution is flexible, and can allow controls to be put in place for the entire organization, departments´ – or individuals´ – usage can be effectively controlled without implementing a blanket ban. The same web filter should can also be used to block other websites – those containing malware.