The reasons why 75% of your staff use Facebook at work

In Human Resource Online by Meghna Gupta

Wondering what your staff is doing on the internet?

A recent survey done by Pew Research Center found that 75% of employees use Facebook or some sort of social media at work, regardless of any policies about social media use on the job.

The study surveyed 2,003 American adults about the different ways they might use social media on the job.

The results indicated that the main reason (34%) they used social media sites, such as Facebook, was to take a mental break from work.

Other reasons included to connect with friends and family at work (27%) and make or support professional connections (24%).

Younger workers also were more likely to have used social media to discover information about their colleagues in comparison to their older counterparts.

In fact, 29% of 18-20 aged employees said that they had discovered information that lowered their opinion of a colleague, and 23% discovered information that improved their opinion.’

“These data show that the rise of social media has added a new layer of job-related activity for many workers as well as new opportunities to ‘escape’ the job when they want to take a break,” said Kenneth Olmstead, a research associate at Pew Research Center and an author of the report.

Furthermore, many employees (51%) reported that their employers had policies about social media use on the job. Despite the expectation that this would influence an employee’s use of social media, 77% reported using social media regardless of whether such a policy was in place.

Other key points of the report include:

• 30% of workers whose companies have an at-work social media policy say they use social media while on the job to take a break from work, compared with 40% of workers whose employers do not have such policies.
• 19% of workers say they ever use Facebook for work-related purposes.
• 78% of workers who use social media platforms for work-related purposes say social media is useful for networking or finding new job opportunities.