Companies should not chastise staff for using social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work, a study by the think tank Demos has suggested.
The report, commissioned by Orange, claimed encouraging employees to use networking technologies to build relationships and closer links with colleagues and customers could help businesses rather than damage them.
Demos researcher and author of the study Peter Bradwell said that while firms were using collaboration software to share information, online social networking sites could also play a role, helping with productivity, innovation and democratic working.
"They are part of the way in which people communicate which they find intuitive," said Bradwell.
"Banning Facebook and the like goes against the grain of how people want to interact. Often people are friends with colleagues through these networks and it is how some develop their relationships.”
However, he said there should be practical guidelines to limit non-work usage.
"Bans on Facebook or YouTube are in any case almost impossible to enforce; firms may as well try to put a time limit on the numbers of minutes allowed each day for gossiping," he wrote.
"The answer is not to close down staff access to social network platforms, nor is it investing blindly in collaborative platforms.
"Rather, we argue that we need to understand how, once we accept the implications of social networks, we can manage the new challenges and trade-offs."
Bradwell’s research concluded that trying to control the use of sites such as Facebook, which alone boasts more than 100 million users worldwide, could even harm organizations.
"Smart" businesses recognized that social networking could not easily be separated from "professional" networking, he argued.
© Crimson Business Ltd. 2008