Facebook: Can it Increase the Emotional Health & Productivity of Your Employees?

By Cara Whedbee, Ph.D.

Facebook.com, if you don’t already know, is one of the most popular social networking Web sites in the world—but what does it have to do with your employees?

Poll Finds Social Time is Crucial to Daily Emotional Well-Being in the U.S.

A recent Gallup-Healthways Happiness-Stress Index report by James Harter and Raksha Arora describes findings that display the crucial role of spending time with friends and family in determining the daily emotional well-being of the American public. In fact, when it comes to the average full-time worker in the United States, the index shows that social time is particularly important to feelings of happiness and enjoyment. Full-time workers, as a group, experience the most happiness, the study shows, when they spend more than seven hours of time with friends and family.

If this is the case, how can your employees increase their emotional well-being, and therefore their productivity, while they are at work if peak happiness requires seven or more hours of time with friends and family?

The Answer for One Software CEO is Facebook

According to an article by David Kirkpatrick for Fortune.com entitled “How one CEO Facebooked his company,” Serena Software CEO, Jeremy Burton, had the idea to use the popular social-networking site, Facebook, to move the company from producing old-school mainframe-oriented products to engineering a new-age, Internet-based Software as a Service (SaaS) product. Burton began by telling his employees it was okay on a Friday for everybody to “goof off and spend an hour or two on Facebook.” This initiative was dubbed “Facebook Friday.” The overt message, according to Burton, was for the employees to get to know one another, but the subversive message was, “Guys—the world is a different place and if we’re going to stay relevant we’re going to have to wake up.”

Now, according to the article, 800 of the company’s 900 employees have Facebook accounts and many use the site actively. Burton can pull the site up on his Blackberry anytime and view the status updates of his employees. His own personal Facebook account also helps his employees get to know him personally, which he realizes is expected and extremely important for his Gen Y employees. Overall, the experiment of this software company with Facebook has been, and continues to be, a profitable success and has helped move the company into the 21st century in their industry.

How Could Facebook Help Your Company?

You now know that your employees need social time to increase their emotional well-being, which should also increase their productivity. You also know that one CEO has successfully utilized the social networking site, Facebook, to accomplish this feat, albeit unknowingly, at his company. So how can you use Facebook with your employees?

First you need to know how Facebook functions, if you don’t already. It is simple to create an account by accessing the homepage of www.facebook.com, where you will be prompted to enter some basic information, select a password, and voila—you have a Facebook account! You also need to know that once you and your employees have accounts, you can only view another person’s account by asking them, using the Facebook Friend Finder, if they will accept you as a friend, and then it is up to that person to respond in the affirmative before you can see their profile page and vice versa. This feature helps with privacy. Once your employees have their accounts set-up, you can create a “group” for your business each person can join to be notified of company events, meetings, etc.

Obviously there are many ways you could utilize Facebook to benefit your employees, and therefore, your business. Here are just a few to get you started:

Try Burton’s concept of a “Facebook Friday” to test the waters and see how your employees respond. For a couple of hours every Friday, the employees would be free to explore Facebook during their workday.
Survey your employees to see how many of them already have a Facebook account. Then create a focus group using the input of some, if not all, of those employees to glean their ideas for using the site to increase the company’s productivity.
Track your progress once you get a majority of employees participating in the program you and your focus group created. You want to know where your employee satisfaction/engagement rates, as well as productivity rates, are before instituting the program, and then at various intervals once the program has been up and running (say monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.).

Regardless of how you decide to utilize Facebook, or any other option for increasing the social time, and therefore the emotional health and productivity of your employees, the numbers don’t lie! So pick an option and get started. You and your employees will be much happier you did.

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