Facebook use in organizations harmful for company
businesses - How to block facebook access to company or
organization network on Linux routers
I don't know if someone has thought about this topic but in my view
Facebook use in organizations has a negative influence on
companies overall efficiency!
Think for a while,
facebook's website is one of the largest
Internet based
"people stealing time machine" so to say. I
mean most people use facebook for pretty much useless stuff on
daily basis (doesn't they ??). The whole original idea of facebook
was to be a lay off site for college people with a lot of time to
spend on nothing.
Yes it is true some companies use facebook succesfully for their
advertising purposes and sperading the awareness of a company brand
or product name but it is also true that many companies
administration jobs like secretaries, accountants even probably
CEOs loose a great time in facebook useless games and picture
viewing etcetera.
Even
government administration job positioned people who
have access to the internet access facebook often from their work
place. Not to mention, the mobility of people nowdays doesn't even
require facebook to be accessed from a desktop PC. Many people
employeed within companies, who does not have to work in front of a
computer screen has already modern mobile "smart phones" as the
business people incorrectly call this mini computer devices which
allows them to browse the NET including facebook.
Sadly Microsoft (.NET) programmers and many of the programmers on
various system platforms developers, software beta testers and sys
admins are starting to adopt this "facebook loose your time for
nothing culture". Many of my friends actively use the Facebook,
(probably) because they're feeling lonely in front of the computer
screen and they want to have interaction with someone.
Anyways, the effect of this constant fb use and aline social
networks is clear. If in the company the employeed personal has to
do work on the computer or behind any Internet plugged device, a
big time of the use of the device is being 'invested' in facebook
to kill some time instead of investing the same time for innovation
within the company or doing the assigned tasks in the best possible
way
Even those who use facebook occasionally from their work place (by
occasionally I mean when they don't have any work to do on the work
place), they are constantly distracted (focus on work stealed) by
the hanging opened browser window and respectively, when it comes
to do some kind of work their work efficiency drops severely.
You might wonder how do I know that facebook opened browser tab
would have bad interaction with the rest of the employee work. Well
let me explain. Its a well known scientifically proven fact that
the human mind is not designed to do simultaneously multiple tasks
(we're not computers, though even computers doesn't work perfect
when simultaneous tasks are at hand.).
Therefore using facebook in parallel with their daily job most
people nowdays try to "multi task" their job and hence this
reflects in poor work productivity per employee. The chain result
cause of the worsened productivity per employee is therefore seen
in the end of the fiscal quarter or fiscal year in
bad
productivity levels, bad or worsened quality of product and hence
to poor financial fiscal results.
I've worked before some time for company whose CEO has realized
that the use of certain Internet resources like
facebook, gmail
and yahoo mail - hurts the employee work productivity and
therefore the executive directors asked me to
filter out
facebook, GMAIL and mail.yahoo as well as few other website
which consumed a big portion of the employees time ...
Well apparantly this CEO was smart and realized the harm this
internet based resources done to his business. Nowdays however many
company head executives did not realize the bad effect of the heavy
use of public internet services on their work force and never ask
the system administrator to filter out this employees efficiency
stealers.
I hope this article, will be eventually red by some middle or small
sized company with
deteriorating efficiency and this will
motivate some companies to introduce an anti-facebook and gmail
use policy to boost up the company performance.
As one can imagine, if you sum up all the harm all around the world
to companies facebook imposed by simply exposing the employees to
do facebooking and not their work, this definitely worsenes the
even severe economic crisis raging around ...
The topic of
how facebook use destroyes many businesses is quite
huge and actually probably I'm missing a lot of hardmful
aspects to business that can be imposed by just a simple "innocent
facebook use", so I will be glad to hear from people in comments,
if someone at all benefits of facebook use in an company office (I
seriously doubt there is even one).
Suppose you are a company that does big portion of their job behind
a computer screen over the internet via a Software as a Service
internet based service, suppose you have a project deadline you
have to match. The project deadline is way more likely to be
matched if you filter out facebook.
Disabling access to facebook of employees and adding company
policy to prohibit social network use and rules & regulations
prohibiting time consuming internet spaces should produce good
productivity results for company lightly.
Though still the employees can find a way to access their out of
the job favourite internet services it will be way harder.
If the employee work progress is monitored by installed cameras,
there won't be much people to want to cheat and use Facebook, Gmail
or any other service prohibited by the company internal codex
Though this are a draconian measures, my personal view is
that its better for a company to have such a policy, instead of pay
to their emloyees to browser facebook....
I'm not aware what is the situation within many of the companies
nowdays and how many of them prohibit the fb, hyves, google plus
and the other kind of "anti-social" networks.
But I truly hope more and more organizations chairman / company
management will comprehend the damages facebook makes to their
business and will issue a new policy to prohibit the use of
facebook and the other alike shitty services.
In the mean time for those running an organization routing its
traffic through a GNU / Linux powered router and who'd like to
prohibit the facebook use to increase the company employees
efficiency use this few lines of bash code + iptables:
#!/bin/sh
# Simple iptables firewall rules to filter out
www.facebook.com
# Leaving www.facebook.com open from your office will have impact
on employees output ;)
# Written by hip0
# 05.03.2012
get_fb_network=$(whois 69.63.190.18|grep CIDR|awk '{ print $2
}');
/sbin/iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -d ${get_fb_network} -j
DROP
Here is also the same
filter out facebook, tiny shell script / blocks access to facebook
script
If the script logic is followed I guess facebook can be disabled on
other company networks easily if the router is using CISCO, BSD
etc.
I will be happy to hear if someone did a research on how much a
company efficiency is increased whether in the company office
facebook gets filtered out. My guess is that efficiency will
increase at least with 30% as a result of prohibition of just
facebook.
Please drop me a comment if you have an argument against or for my
thesis.