Facebook as a Business Productivity Tool
Is Facebook helping productivity or a distraction towards work? Some companies think it is a distraction and has banned the social media site from office networks. I believe this is the wrong approach especially in dealing with the new generation of young employees. There is an increasingly blurred-line between work and leisure and companies that try to separate the two are doing themselves a disfavour by not leveraging on the power of social media.
I am big advocate of Facebook as a productivity tool. Our current startup at ChallegeJam uses Facebook extensively in communicating with team members and segregating information especially since we are all students with different schedules and do not have an office space to work together any single day. We use the messaging tool to have individual discussions on issues and make very strong use of the group to have discussions among the 6 members of the team (or the separate functional team – Marketing and Development)
Above is a screenshot of the Facebook group which I use with my society members in SIFE UCL. We are a social entrepreneurship society and our project this year is to help a charity – Heritage Without Border (HWB) develop a revenue stream. We made great use of the Document feature in the group and has created to date 14 documents on various proposals for HWB. Each document can be edited by other members and discussions are ongoing on the content.
No doubt the document feature is very limited and is only good for typing out words and is not full-featured like Google Docs but it really helps collaboration since each member receives a notification on Facebook and can easily check the updates anytime. This beats any other productivity tool because young people spend so much time on Facebook, much more than on email and are more comfortable with Facebook usage.
On our ChallengeJam groups, we use it to share links, updates on progress, images of logos and screenshots of designs. It is definitely a way that work for us as a startup. If you are a student reading this you may want to try it out on your society committee members or with your startup founders.
