James Governor passes on some real wisdom from David Stewart (via the Australian Daily Telegraph) - who had something of an epiphany about shutting off access to social media at work:

“It got closed down because there was this fear in the market that it was going to destroy the whole world. Yet, they let people talk on their phones, and let them go out and have a cigarette and talk on their mobile phones, but they closed down what is a fundamental communication tool to probably more than half of our workforce.”

Contrast that with the attitude James quotes from one of his colleague's blog, that social media, web mail, IM (etc) are distractions that workers don't need. This is a fairly common attitude, and one that James rightly throws cold water on. His point is made via people who went to college recently, but heck - some of the rest of us use tools like IM, IRC, and social media to stay connected as well. Here at Cincom, a large proportion of our Smalltalk group (across development and beyond it) uses an IRC channel to stay connected - both internally and externally. Many of us also use various IM clients for individual conversations - there's often more than one "back channel" going when there are group conference calls.

If you want forward progress, you have to trust the people you hire. That doesn't mean you should be blind to mistakes (or worse) - but it does mean that you need to respond to problems rather than trying to completely prevent them - cast the block widely enough, and you block productivity - and end up with a set of employees that looks at the corporate network as more of a jail than anything else. Sure, there are places where such blocks are appropriate - national defense sector stuff, for instance - but elsewhere? Not so much. If your company is blocking such access, you have to wonder just how engaged the decision makers are.

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