Inhibiting socialization tools for your employees creates low spirits
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Sometimes companies adopt the repressive policy of discouraging their employees from using chats or other tools which would make them waste their time. This, instead of increasing productivity, can have the opposite result. Let us see why.
First of all, we should distinguish between those tools which are born and exist only to make people socialize and have fun and those which can have also implications for their work.
Let us see the case of Skype, for example. The use you make of it can have different connotations. For sure it can be used to “waste time” with friends, family or external people who have nothing to do with your job activities, but it is still also a very good tool to communicate with partners, colleagues and customers who are far and with which otherwise a neverending exchange of emails or phone calls would be necessary.
What has a higher impact on a company’s budget? The waste of time of a limited number of employees who spend few half-hours chatting with friends, or the real difficulty for the whole staff to keep in touch with other parts that are fundamental to carry out their job?
Skype makes communications easy, whatever they are. And even if an employee decides to say hi to a friend during working hours, the time he will use will be still shorter than the time he would need if he made a phone call.
Together with this, one of the most important aspects to analyze is the climate that follows. Using too repressive methods, such as inhibiting Skype, blocking the access to social or external networks, keeping your employees under 24-hour control has the only effect of making them live in an unpleasant, tense environment. Particularly if the company hopes to receive creative and constructive ideas from its resources, this is the way to completely annihilate them.
In the next posts we will go deeper into the importance of a healthy environment for workers, but I would like to underline already from now that imposing a code that is too strict and aimed only at productivity often has counterproductive effects starting from the lower levels, that is, manpower, essential for any kind of development.
As we have seen in other cases, also here dialogue is the winning key to boost the employees’ morale, keep them happy to work and put them in the condition to produce at their best, but also to lower their stress with tools of any kind: from a recreational centre inside the company, to well-equipped halls to take a break, to a gymnasium and, why not, also some online entertainment without the fear of being “caught”.
A happy worker will also be a worker who doesn’t need to look for subterfuges while pretending to carry out his duties. On the contrary, he will be willing to do some overtime, if necessary, because he is sure to receive some reward in exchange.
