The problem isn’t Facebook, it’s apathy
Banning employees from using networking websites such as Facebook, as an estimated 70% of UK employers have done, is hopelessly naive. The reality is that wherever you have large offices, state-run or private, you will have people finding innovative ways to waste time. Banning Facebook will simply lead to a revival of other quaint time-fillers, such as the fictional dentist appointment.
The real issue is that most people either hate or are indifferent to their jobs.
According to Gallup, one in five workers is actively disengaged from their job and a further three in five are described as sleepwalking through their day. Confronting this apathy requires a huge shift away from mass employment in large offices towards entrepreneurship and self-employment. A global survey by the Career Innovation Group reported a significantly higher level of job satisfaction among the self-employed. The work itself may be identical, but people feel a closer connection with their output and have an incentive to make their business work.
In other words, they are paid for being productive, not for turning up.
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Comments
By shaun sayers on January 1st, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Couldn’t agree more with this assessment. People are actively trading their most valuable commodity – days of their lives that they can’t get back or replace – for what? Personally as an employer if I felt that I was paying people to make that sacrifice I would find it hard to reconcile my conscience if there was little point or value to it. How often do we hear of people dropping down dead shortly after retirement from a god-awful job?
The situation is frankly immoral when you take it to bits
By shaun sayers on January 1st, 2008 at 11:31 am
Couldn't agree more with this assessment. People are actively trading their most valuable commodity – days of their lives that they can't get back or replace – for what? Personally as an employer if I felt that I was paying people to make that sacrifice I would find it hard to reconcile my conscience if there was little point or value to it. How often do we hear of people dropping down dead shortly after retirement from a god-awful job?
The situation is frankly immoral when you take it to bits