At 3 pm today, I was in my office working on my expense reports. A colleague here at FaceTime popped his head in and said "you do your expense reports during work hours?"
What exactly are work hours?
For professional workers, there is no such thing any more. That's pretty clear to me, as I get ready to post this around 9 pm. Joe McKendrick over at the FastForward blog thinks so too. The lines between work and personal life continue to blur. Expense reports, employee reviews, press releases, product plans... they all need to get done, and it doesn't really matter when you work on them. My guess is that if employers started saying "your work hours are 8 to 5" there would be a lot less work accomplished. No one at FaceTime would ever attempt to define my work hours, for this very reason.
In contrast, though, my neighbor told me recently that the NCAA Web site was blocked by his employer during March Madness - so he called in sick on a Thursday to watch a day of college basketball from home since he couldn't get to it while at work.
Scenarios like this play out in companies all over the world every day. And when employers block or put limits on what their employees can do, does it really solve the problem? Or create a bigger one?
We've seen time and time again that users will continue to do what they need and want to do. Take something as simple as setting email size restrictions - users will find a work around, either using their personal Web mail or a file transfer via IM. Are you better off with that outcome?
According to Wordtracker, over the last 100 days there were a little over 20 Google/Web searches related to "block facebook." Presumably a combination of IT Managers, parents and educators are looking for information about how to restrict access to social networking.
But contrast that with the 359 searches by users looking to "unblock facebook." In total, more than 10,000 searches were made in the same period related to unblocking websites, social networking sites, using anonymizers, proxies and other related searches.
We're always socializing. We're always working. And users will always look for the work around when they are cut off from either.
