Social Media in the Workplace

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Co-workers have therefore used social media as a means of the facilitation of interaction with one another and this catered to the formation of better relationships. A stronger relationship among employees lead to more cohesive and productive work teams.

The usage of social media networking within the workplace encouraged collaboration. Employees have been able to get assistance from colleagues across the organization and posed questions or started a conversation around a topic that has also shown potential to create growth in the department. In the international business organisation, many new businesses have sought assistance for new development strategies that grew their business. One of the business may have an unfamiliar culture that an individual may not be too savvy with thus it has taken a long period of time for the implementation of solutions for various problems. The utilization of internal a social network system such as WhatsApp, has allowed an employee to jump on the SNS and post the question and received timely responses from fellow colleagues which would have maximised efficiency and reduced fatigue by customers not having to wait tirelessly. Employees have definitely built a relationship that fostered creativity and collaboration (The Human Resource Blog, 2017).

Social media improved employee recognition and retention. According to Robert Half, it is a manager’s nightmare for one of their most outstanding employees to have resigned from their position. Social media helped with the eradication of this problem by the creation a means of interaction between staff and the formation of relationships. Social media such as Instagram and Facebook can be used by organisations as a form of recognition for an employee for their hard work and dedication. This in turn would have given employees the opportunity to have congratulated each other. Congratulatory acts would’ve built an environment of teamwork and encouraged peer-to-peer feedback.

The more engaged your employees are, the more likely they would have been to stay with the organisation (Robbins et al, 2011). This advantage can also be linked to Herzberg’s two factor Hygiene theory on job satisfaction.

One disadvantage of usage of social media in the workplace has been the lack of productivity. Nucleus research showed companies that allowed employees to use Facebook during the working hours lose 1.5 percent productivity (Meshi D, Morawetz C, Heekeren, and Neurosci. 2013). Instead of performing their assigned task at work, employees tended to become distracted by social media applications, such status updates and pictures, employees may have found themselves compulsively checking Facebook and Instagram. Although employees may have used these social media platforms as assistance in executing work-related task, these distractions oftentimes outweighed their productivity.

Another disadvantage has been linked to company image and confidentiality. When a company has been spoken about, it has been usually the company’s image being referred to. Which has not only been the position in the market but also in the minds of its clients. When organisations granted their employees the opportunity to have access to social media platforms at work it has proven very risky in some instances. For Many small companies that tried to compete against big corporations, image meant a lot, said Jennifer Jacob Kohn, founder of Los Angeles-based JJKO Design. (Klein, 2006). Primarily in this age of snapchat and its whole conceptualization which has been to broadcast an individual’s lifestyle to the world. Many times, an employee may have unconsciously “snapped” about their new promotion or some other type of confidential business information that the company might not have wanted to be released. These leaks severely damage the company’s image and cost them on potential investments.

These perceptions have a strong influence on how management the operations of organisations and would have a strong impact on the growth and development of the company. By comprehension of these advantages and disadvantages, there has been a much more and defined understanding of how social media impacted the workflow in companies. This will be further analysed in the data analysis.

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Data Analysis

The findings related to the research questions that guided the study. Data was analysed to identify:

- the relationship between workers, their attitudes and work ethics to social media.

Data was collected from questionnaires which were distributed by Casolyn and completed by 35 respondents. Descriptive statistical analysis was used to identify frequencies and percentages to answer all the questions from the questionnaire. Even though all the respondents did not answer the open ended question it was still very useful to see if people agreed or disagreed with having a policy that dictated the usage of social media in the workplace.

Discussion Findings

Demographic Relationship

Demographic variables were displayed in a pie chart entitled chart 1.1 seen below. Results were recorded as followed:

All the participants responded to the first two questions on the questionnaire. Seventy-five percent of the respondents are females and the remaining 25% are males. The data also shows the highest age range of the respondents was between 31-40 years.

[pic 1][pic 2]

Figure 1: The association between Age and Gender

Age, Gender, Social and Average time spent on social media.

In the study of the comparison between age, gender, social media platform and the average time spent on these platforms was depicted in the chart below labelled Chart

These results were observed based on collected data and literature findings:

It was indicated that Instagram was the leading social media platform.

Forty-six percent of the respondents said they spent about 1-6 hours per day on their favourite social media platform.

Initial results indicated that those who utilized social media at work use a variety of collaboration applications such as Facebook. Facebook had seventeen percent whilst twitter and snapchat both sixteen percent of the previously mentioned above.In January 2009,