The following post is republished from AccountingWEB, a source of accounting news, information, tips, tools, resources and insight–everything you need to help you prosper and enjoy the accounting profession.
It’s likely that your employees spend a sizeable percentage of their time using social media. As work/life balance continues to blend into one homogenous string of activities, social media activity is happening in your workplace whether you realize it or not.
But isn’t social media just a big waste of time?
It can be, but lumping all soci to the same unproductive bucket is unfair, and also unwise. Social media can be an effective tool for many key business activities – including business development, client retention, and employee retention and recruitment.
Because platforms like Facebook often blend personal and business colleagues, it’s very challenging to set black and white rules when governing the use of social media.
Free reign on social media = Trust
At Chrometa, we take a mostly laissez faire approach to our employees’ use of social media, with no official policies or restriction on what employees are allowed to do. I know this thinking is counterintuitive to what many accounting and consulting firms believe, but I think this boils down to a control issue more than anything else. It’s sort of similar to being told as a child not to get into the cookie jar. If firms set up policies dictating certain actions, employees are more likely to violate these policies if they feel they can get away with it without being noticed.
Each of our employees is encouraged to set up and maintain a presence on “The Big 3” social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Their participation levels, on the other hand, are completely up to them. A couple of our employees really enjoy and benefit, both personally and professionally, from their time on Facebook and Twitter. Ironically, our chief technical officer generally dislikes social media and personally avoids it.
At the core of our free reign is trust. We trust that our employees are 100 percent devoted to the success of our company, mission, and brand. As a result, I have complete trust they will not represent us poorly; to do so would be like representing themselves poorly. This level of trust is only possible if an employee does completely self-identify with his or her job and firm.
How much time is too much time?
I personally have spent too much time on many occasions on the Big 3 and blogs, as well, without achieving what I’d consider a reasonable ROI on my time. Going forward, I know I need to more accurately gauge the amount of time I should spend on each medium.
It’s not completely fair and accurate when people proclaim, “Twitter is a complete waste of time” because they probably just don’t understand what it can do. Twitter can be a drain, but it also can be useful if used properly and marketed to your stakeholders. Like anything, if you spend too much time on Twitter, you can end up wasting a lot of time if you don’t use it wisely.
How-much-time-too-much-time is something everyone must figure out for themselves. I give our employees the leeway to decide how much time is too much. I know they honestly want to be productive and perform their roles to the best of their ability. Because I know this, I find it’s better if they figure out these types of limits and best practices themselves, instead of having them come as edicts from above.
It’s About Time is a series of articles devoted to practice management techniques that focus on efficiency and productivity.
About the Author:
Brett Owens is CEO and cofounder of Chrometa, a Sacramento, CA-based provider of time-tracking software that records activity in real time. Previously marketed to the legal community, Chrometa is branching out to accounting prospects. Gains include the ability to discover previously undocumented billable time, saving time on billing reconciliation, and improving personal productivity. Owens also is blogger and founder at CommodityBullMarket.com and ContraryInvesting.com, as well as a regular contributor to two leading financial media sites, SeekingAlpha.com and BeforeItsNews.com.
A repository for shitty memes. Come on GC, you’re better than that (although lately, based on current content, seems like you’re not….)
Been hearing that for 13 years, try some new material.
Doesn’t change the fact that its a true criticism. You’re trying to attract the younger reddit crowd and its silly. And 13 years you’ve been hearing this? How about listen to your user base and fix it? Doesn’t surprise me that I come here less and less.
So what specifically would you like to see? Because you’ve offered criticism but no hint of a solution other than saying we shouldn’t post memes. The numbers we see on the backend don’t reflect your personal opinion but hey, I’m certainly open to hearing it.
And yes, we’ve been hearing it for 13 years because no matter what we cover there will always be people who complain about it. That has very little to do with us and everything to do with the fact that you can’t please everyone all the time. Sure, we’ve posted some dumb shit over the years. That’s kinda the point. People don’t come here to read about lease accounting and practice management for midsize firms. It’s shitposting all the way down, my friend.
While I happen to agree with at least one thing about you, your name. Most of the “content” you’re probably referring to here that you enjoy, is a result of internal communication leaks. So go ahead and start leaking some emails to GC if it’s so important.
Gossip from Fishbowl doesn’t qualify as “internal communication leaks”. Nor does shitty memes.