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How Zuckerberg can limit office skiving

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Core Tip:With 1.5bn active members, Facebook is on the way to achieving its aim of connecting everyone in the world, all 7.3bn of us, from mewling babes to muddled centenarians. But the social networking giant faces obstacles. One is China, wooed by Facebook chief
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With 1.5bn active members, Facebook is on the way to achieving its aim of connecting everyone in the world, all 7.3bn of us, from mewling babes to muddled centenarians. But the social networking giant faces obstacles. One is China, wooed by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg with a speech in Beijing last weekend, which he delivered in Mandarin in the hope of charming the country into lifting its ban on his ?product.

The other challenge to crack is the global workforce of 3bn people, many based in offices where employers have done a China and blocked the site. The tech firm’s response has been to launch Facebook at Work, a business-friendly twin to the personal service. It has received a boost with the news this week that Royal Bank of Scotland will adopt it for its 100,000 staff by the end of 2016. 

The work version looks like the personal site; users can join groups, share files and swap messages. The difference is that no one outside their company can see any of it. The app has screenshots of idealised examples, like a young woman messaging her colleagues with the inspiring sentiment: “Can’t believe I’ve been at Acme for two years! I couldn’t ask for a better workplace.”

It sounds Orwellian, a coercive scheme that China’s politburo would be happy to “like” were it on Facebook. But the truth is more nuanced. What we are actually witnessing is a pragmatic acceptance of skiving. 

Every working day has moments when we are not technically working. One example is the famous water-cooler moment beloved of entertainment executives, when staff mill around filling flimsy paper cones while discussing the new Star Wars film. Smoking breaks are another. Cigarettes may take years off your life but they also steal about 20 minutes daily from your employer. 

The internet has transformed the many pauses that punctuate office work. With so much time spent at a computer, the screen has taken over as the place for truancy. In the old days, we might have gazed out the window or made a furtive phone call. Now we can send personal emails or check the weather forecast while pretending to work. 

Every working day has moments when we are not technically working. One example is the famous water-cooler moment.

The world wide web is capacious enough to be both an aid to productivity and the most powerful tool for skiving ever invented. Businesses can keep tabs on its misuse with monitoring programmes. But, like smoking or tea breaks, a small amount of personal time is usually tolerated — and many employees expect it. When a risqué link is sent with the message “not safe for work”, the warning implies there is some content that is safe for work, the sort of thing that should not lead to disciplinary action — clips of kittens being tickled, say, or toddlers singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

Sharing banal YouTube videos is no different from idle chat, a lubricant in the social life of the workplace. A 2012 analysis of 600,000 internal emails between Enron staff — among the largest publicly available caches following the company’s bankruptcy — discovered that almost 15 per cent was devoted to gossip. The Georgia Tech researchers who conducted the survey judged the proportion to be typical.

Private life seeps into work life. Technology is criticised for colonising free time with an always-on-call culture, but the opposite also holds true. The internet has transformed our expectations of what we can get away with at work. 

If RBS’s 100,000 employees are not allowed to swap chatter and jokes on Facebook at Work — if they are expected only to ping each other messages like “OK, sent you the new revision!” — then they will spend as little time on it as possible. But their bosses surely know that. What we see here is not an attack on digital skiving but a test-case in setting its limits. Enlightened corporations of the 21st century, take note. 
 

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