Mike: Social networking, big thing over the past several years with things like MySpace, Facebook, we’ve got Jack Kapica on the line from the globeandmail. Jack I wanna talk about social networking. What kind of impact that has on business or our people spending more time on line now, than they’re actually working?
Jack: Well, of course, I mean we are being given an internet access to our offices, and on our desks, isn’t that critical part of our business life?
Mike: Of course.
Jack: Now, this is what your friend is here to study, that was done in England, that proves that something like, people who visits social networking and to use MSN, and instant messenger, all the things like that. Social networking on line are costing the British economy 6 and half billion dollar.
Mike: That’s a lot of coin.
Jack: Which I think has a lot of who you asked me, but what happens here is of course, this is another one of those surveys that I really like, because you can basically prove any damn thing you want, for instance I can conduct the survey right now and calculated exactly how much money you’re costing me to talk to you,
Mike: Clearly thousand of dollars.
Jack: And that’s the problem, another question is of course, how do you define what is time wasting, the thing is, ok, let me back up from a moment here. I met a guy couple of weeks ago who’s an IT manager at some company whose name I missed, thank heavens. And he basically said to me that his job, part of his job anyway was to report employees who spent too much time on certain social networks, certain non productive sites. And report them to the management. And he seems to tell me that he does it with great glee, reporting these people, and basically he goes to sleep at night very well, because he things that it’s not his judgment of course, it’s what management decides to do with the information that he happened, that he gleefully report to them. I’m not entirely sure I like this, I was very uncomfortable in his position or in his presence rather. But what happened is of course if you’ll do that with me, you would discover I spent a lot of time on instant messaging myself. That’s all he would have found, about me and reported me hotly. But then, he would not be able to say what I was doing on line on instant messenger. In fact, a lot of my, most of my instant messaging right now is with business contact. Almost all of the people I deal with are in technology, and almost all of them have instant messaging systems. And we all chat on line, I get information, I asked questions on line, everything goes like that. If I go to social networking site, maybe I’m going there to do some research. How do you know what’s important? But what really bothers me is that the bottom of all of these is some sort of puritanical view of what working is like. Working is not anything that I don’t say it is. Right? In other words, if you’re suppose to be punching numbers and crunching them, that means you’re supposed to be staring at a spreadsheet all day long. You’re not allowed to do anything else. You’re not allowed to call anybody up on instant messenger and say “now what did you mean by this particular line in your financial report”, you can’t do that, you see, because these people are saying, well, this is time wasting. How do you define time wasting, I don’t understand how they can do that.
Mike: Clearly the globeandmail been monitoring you and have called you up on.
Jack: Oh clearly. Of course, I mean, this is insane, this creates an extremely toxic work atmosphere. And goes back to something that we’re talking about some time ago, which is you know, the stress on a job. And I can’t stand it when somebody says around we define what my work is by measuring what website I go to. Besides, do they measure whether I do this with a coffee break or my lunch break? They didn’t, they just measured that I’ve been there, spent an hour there, and to them that’s an outrageous, they’re gonna turn me in, is that wonderful, we have a secret police hiding in our IT department.
Mike: Well I guess my problem with, that is that we asked our employees now to be more connected than ever before, you know, they’ve got the blackberry’s, they’re even working at night time now, so, you know, working and home life is kind of blurring. And I’m just wondering is it fair to tell people at work, no you can’t use any of these types of avenues to you know, have more balance life.
Jack: From a management point of view, what they’re doing is they’re saying, yes you can use all of these tools but only for the purposes of which we set. And this is of course a very simple way of telling people things. But it doesn’t work that way. Very few things work that way. Human nature is what it is. I mean, there has to be some sort of leeway, and the days before technology came along, did you’re company ever complain that you spoke to your wife everyday on the phone, well no, because there will seems to be like there’s an anti family people. But now, they don’t know which phone number you’re calling, they just know that you’re calling on the job and you are probably wasting time. You see where I’m getting at, they’re missing the kind of, they’re missing the soul of what you’re doing. They’re missing the soul of how you behave. How human being behave on a job. Not all human beings, you know, some are perhaps more productive in a shorter of period of time. Others, others take longer to do. Who’s to say what the yardstick is. It’s up to an intelligent, sensitive manager who knows how to handle people to decide, whether you are going to be wasting 6 and a half what quadzillian pounds a year of tax payers money, or business productivity or whatever, I don’t know, I can’t stand it, it drives me nut.
Mike: Well Jack, I wanna thank you again for joining us and I’ll catch up on you on Facebook after the interview.
Jack: Thank you.
Mike: Jack Kapica from globeandmail, you can check out more of his articles and blogging up at globetechnology.com
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