Social Media Impacts on Productivity for Businesses

Every day billions of people around the world check their phones and computers to look at social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and the like. Employees at the office probably check their phones all the time for new posts, likes, and comments. It’s a productivity problem as it’s estimated that businesses lose 30% productivity of this distracting behavior. Another reason to be alarmed over this activity is that this distraction can cause safety problems in the workplace. For an example, a person could be distracted at a manufacturing plant which results in a workplace accident, resulting in loss of output and potentially a life.

In a previous blog post, we discussed the implementation of an IT Usage policy which would govern the use of devices that are owned by the business. But sometimes, this is not enough. This is where the consideration of blocking social media accounts comes in. In order to block social media accounts, one must have a firewall that is capable of doing this. Another option is to implement a proxy server which can both monitor non-work-related sites such as social media that employees look at, how much time is spent looking at these sites, as well as blocking access to those sites.

If non-work-related internet activity is affecting your business, give us a call at Myriad Information Technology Solutions and we can implement an internet proxy or provide guidance and advice to reduce the loss of productivity and save your business time and money.