When I wrote “A Corporate Guide for Social Media“  for my Forbes column this single statement drew the most attention:

Build your policies around job performance, not fuzzy concerns about productivity.

If your employees are using Facebook at work, they are also likely checking work e-mail after dinner or at odd hours of the day. Don’t ask them to give up the former if you expect them to continue the latter. If you have good performance measurements, playing the “lost productivity” card is a canard.

It even landed me an interview from the CBS Evening News.   In the meantime I have had a lot of opportunity to consider whether my points hold up over time: (1) that social technologies don’t represent anything fundamentally new in terms of distractions, (2) that the issue of productivity is a misplaced suspicion that could be cured by properly defining and measuring job performance -(3) that employers rarely consider that they are asking employees to stay checked-in after work hours.     For the most part I think that these arguments do hold up.

While it is true that “information overload” is a defining feature of the modern workplace it is also true that business workplace productivity has increased year over year despite these challenges.     How is it that individual studies proclaim the costs of distraction (25 minutes to return to tasks after an email interruption!) while labor studies show increased overall productivity?

Paradoxically I would suggest that the same tools that we complain about in terms of lost productivity and distraction at an individual level are precisely the tools that are increasing overall workplace productivity.

Related posts:

1. The Productivity Myth – Step Away From the Twitter – Get Back to Work
2. To Tweet Or Not to Tweet – Handling Employee Use of Social Technologies
3. Establishing Your Corporate Social Media Policy