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Bosses Urged to Crackdown on Office Facebook Addicts
Workers who use social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook in the office could be facing the sack, experts warned today.
Thousands of workers regularly log-on to networking sites – which allow users to create their own profile page, add photographs and chat to friends.
However, the content of sites such as Facebook, which has more than 826,000 people registered on it, is rarely monitored by managers.Experts at Employment Law Advisory Services said the increasing popularity of sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, would inevitably lead to problems for bosses.
Peter Mooney, a spokesman for ELAS, said: “Most contracts nowadays have a clause which restricts internet use to business use only. Unless you can argue it is an important work tool, people should not be accessing these sites during work time.
“A manager could quite easily sack someone if they caught them using these social networking sites during office hours.
“We saw these kind of problems emerging after the widespread introduction of e-mail systems in the workplace and obviously the same problems will affect the use of these sites.
“I remember one case where a receptionist was caught out with 700 personale-mails between her and a friend. She was sacked there and then. It is easy to see how a similar situation could arise with these social networking sites.”
In July, a poll revealed that two thirds of top London companies are now banning or restricting the use of internet site Facebook over fears that staff are wasting time on it.
The site was first banned by several American and Canadian companies who noticed the large amounts of time employees were spending on it.
A study found British users spend on average 191 minutes a month on Facebook and dozens of people have admitted to "Facebook addiction", where they check on their friends, and often exes, compulsively.
Our study found British Gas, the Met, Lloyds TSB and Bristows law firm all had internet filters preventing sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hotmail being viewed at work.
The internet site, which now has four million users in Britain, was set up in 2004 by 23-year-old American student Mark Zuckerberg.
He is facing a legal threat from a rival website, ConnectU, the owners of which allege they and Zuckerberg conceived Facebook while at Harvard University.
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