Nearly 6% of the UK’s 34m strong workforce spend over an hour a day on social media while at work, amounting to more than one eighth of their entire working day, a survey has revealed.
Research by MyJobGroup, a network operator of regional jobsites, found that Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks could potentially be costing the UK up to £14b in lost work time, with small businesses most likely to be hardest hit by the drop in productivity.
Lee Fayer, managing director of Myjobgroup.co.uk, said: “Our results clearly show that UK workers are spending increased time whilst at work on social media networks, which, left unchecked, could have negative repercussions on the productivity of many companies across the country.”
However, cloud computing enterprise Salesforce is banking on social media being the way forward for businesses and yesterday introduced the business social application Chatter at the CloudForce conference 2010. The application functions in a similar way to Facebook, but operates only within a single company to provide faster business collaboration.
Speaking at the CloudForce event, director of product marketing at Salesforce, Robin Daniels, said: “Chatter helps bring business conversations to life and is a smarter way to collaborate. It is a great example of bringing people together who wouldn’t generally meet - such as across geographic or departmental boundaries.”
Chatter allows companies to collaborate in real-time by sharing documents, people, processes and data. It also allows people working in a team to share information in a private group.
Chen Kotecha is managing director at ScanCom which supplies Blackberry devices and software and has been using Chatter in the business for three years. Kotecha commented: “One of the real advantages of Chatter for my company is that I have the manpower of 24 with only 12 employees, so it saves time which increases profitability.”