We all know about Facebook as a social aid, but have you ever thought of it as a way to boost productivity in the workplace? Well, Forbes has:
SAN FRANCISCO — The productivity of today’s workforce is under assault by the sheer volume of e-mail that is hurled at it on any given work day. We’re held hostage by our inboxes and often feel paralyzed by the constant, overwhelming barrage of information. When the work week ends, we are chained to BlackBerrys and iPhones checking e-mail. Yet on Monday morning, we still return to the office dreading what’s awaiting us in our overloaded inboxes.
Rewind about 15 years, back when e-mail was revolutionary. Then, e-mail served an important purpose as a bridge to online communications. However, the fatal flaw of e-mail is its captive model. Whether you’re interested or not, information is shoved at you regardless of its relevancy or importance…. Productivity is squandered as we spend time manually filtering through e-mail to determine its relevancy to our specific roles.
… Yet we don’t dread logging into Facebook the same way we do our e-mail because the information in Facebook is somehow more interesting and more useful to us. Why? The biggest difference is that social media empowers us to choose the people we connect with, the topics we want to know more about and how we want to receive information. Facebook isn’t passive like e-mail; it gives users an active role in selecting the information that is most interesting to them…
Social media tools can improve productivity because they were specifically designed for large-scale collaboration–something that didn’t exist when e-mail penetrated the workplace…
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