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I’m in 100% agreement that results are what are most important. If users can have free access to social media and also get the results, then that’s all that really matters. I’m not sure if I understand how that is possible – but it is ok if I don’t understand. The results will speak for themselves.

I like your point about remote workers. I find one of the reasons more workers are not remote yet is because of this productivity issue – or at least management expecting there will be issues with productivity if workers are allowed to work remotely. Also, even at the office if social media is blocked, the employee can whip out their web enabled mobile phone and bypass the blocking – though someone might notice the employee spending a lot of time using their phone.

To me, as long as workers are paid based on their production instead of being paid per hour or salaried, then I see the point you make about the only reason to block social media is a security risk. Maybe a HR risk too since an employee might file a lawsuit based on something they see on a coworker’s screen. On the other hand, while workers are salaried or paid by the hour, I see social media as a huge danger to the livelihood and profitability of an organization. I may be wrong.

For workers on a farm harvesting vegetables, it is easy to pay them based on how many vegetables they harvest. For other jobs, it becomes more difficult to monitor the productivity and pay accordingly. I like how car repair firms do it. They look up a car’s make, model, and year and they know just how many “units” to charge for the labor to perform any operation on the car from replacing the transmission to fixing the windshield wiper motor. Mechanics are paid accordingly, and customers are billed a markup. I used a similar model charging for computer repairs when I ran an outsourced IT firm in the 90′s. Then, I didn’t worry about my employees spending time on other tasks besides work – I knew they weren’t being paid for wasted time nor were clients being charged. If the employee failed to deliver in a timely manner, I could retrain, and if that didn’t work, replace them with an employee who would. I am interested to learn more about the ROWE model.

Please keep enlightening me – I find this helpful.

I’m somewhere in the middle on this between “lock it all down and keep them from stealing time,” and “full open to do what they want when they want.”

I believe in doing the best we can do develop “ROWE” organizations – Results Only Work Environment. I’m convinced that the workplace of the future for many of our knowledge workers will be remote, so we will have little control over exactly what they do. As long as they are completing the work assigned in a timely, accurate and innovative way, I could not care less if they spend an hour on facebook.

However, from a data security point of view, we can and must make sure that we lock things down to avoid security leaks. You are very instrumental in showing us how to do that and it’s much appreciated. So for me, tightening the system for security reasons is really the only driving force behind limiting employees access. Developing a ROWE organization is a force driving me toward an open system. I’m almost always somewhere in the middle based on the pull of these two forces.

Dave Kinnear
Executive Coach

I had a growing group of Facebook addicts on my team who began abusing the privilege of internet access. So I cut off all but a handful of our computers.

Much groaning ensued, while work productivity and teamwork went up.