logo

Ban it or intranet it?

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Matthew
Filed Under Uncategorized |

So Australia’s largest telco company, Telstra, has taken the step to ban its employees from using Facebook. Interesting considering that half of Australia seems to be on it and any company trying to get people ‘online’ you think would embrace it. “This would be a retarded move for ANY company, let alone a company that is trying to position itself as a company that “gets” online,” points out Cameron Reilly at G’Day World.

Facebook popularity has rocketed in recent months. Hardly an employee here doesn’t have a profile. Seimens has taken it a step further. It is planning to create Facebook apps for business use and potentially replace its intranet. At present 6,000 of Siemen’s 500,000 employees have accounts so there is somewhere to go but the concept is there.

Considering that most Facebook users aren’t that savvy regarding their privacy settings a cheap way for IT and management to monitor employees (or maybe a way to become privacy savvy).

First seen on Techcrunch

Comments

2 Responses to “Ban it or intranet it?”

  1. Tim on July 30th, 2007 3:02 pm

    Depends doesn’t it.

    Depends on whether the staff were observed and deemed to be abusing it rather than considering how the business could benefit from it. Simply using the internet for personal reasons for an unreasonable amount of time is no different than sitting on your phone at work, which the company pays for, chatting to friends or family.

    The sad fact is, the majority of staff do indeed abuse such a perk and rarely use their internet surfing time as proper research or to deliver benefits back to the company. That’s why up to 70% of City firms, according to the Daily Mail, now ban it:-

    http://tinyurl.com/3czaha

    If Siemens replace their intranet with plugins to a social community site that is subject to legal proceedings and could be shut down at any time then they’re more nuts than I thought.

  2. Richard on July 30th, 2007 5:11 pm

    Facebook’s addictive and basically social so I can see why companies might ban it. But I think employees should be judged by what they contribute i.e. the work they do. If that’s good, there’s no need to worry too much about Facebook/texting/IM or whatever. So, it’s a non-issue, IMHO.

Leave a Reply