Who knew? If I may borrow a line from the Mashable article: “Hey, bosses who block employees from using social media at work: You’re doing it wrong.”
Seriously, if you run a business and forbid social media, you are truly doing it wrong. Ok, so an assembly line worker may not need to check his Facebook alerts every 30 minutes, but your sales staff might.
Anyway, down to the meat and potatoes of this thing. There is this company called Evolv, and they have been tracking literally hundreds of stats on Fortune 500 companies. You can imagine that they could come up with some really interesting things! Well, they have.
Hourly employees who regularly used up to 4 social networks were able to make more sales or handle more support calls than those that don’t, thus making them MORE productive workers, not less productive. Interestingly, they also worked for their employer longer than those that didn’t.
To increase that point in your head, those that used 5 or more social networks preformed better than those who used 4 or less, though they stuck around for just less (but still much better than those who didn’t use social networks.
Reasons for being more productive are numerous. Everything from computer literacy to social abilities could be the real reason. However, the fact remains that simply being involved in social networks (not just a member) really does translate to success in the workplace, and thus employers should encourage its use (though you need to be sure to get those TPS reports turned in with the *correct* cover sheets) throughout the workplace rather than discourage it.