Social Media in the Workplace
There is no emoji that expresses my feelings about social media in the workplace, but thanks to Buzzfeed’s list of “19 Emojis All Thirty-Somethings Need In Their Life” I found it. The “I Am So Overwhelmed By Social Media” Emoji
The problem with social media in the workplace is that there is so much duplication. I am all for using social media where it improves productivity or makes things smoother, but so often we have multiple apps or platforms that just do the same thing. Partly this is because of overlap in what the platform is designed to do, and partly it’s because a certain percentage of my coworkers will prefer one over another. At my last workplace we had at least 2 apps for each of the following: messaging, document sharing & collaboration, discussion boards, and task management. None of which were integrated with our email and calendaring system.
Of course, we muddled by because we were all sitting next to each other in the same set of cubicles, so if something wasn’t working, we could just ask each other. Sometimes that begged the question as to why we needed the tools at all — a whiteboard would have done just as well for the task management, and it seemed the best usage for the instant messaging was for individuals to make smug remarks at someone’s expense that they didn’t want the rest of the office to hear.
On the whole, however, I felt like sometimes we were spending so much time figuring out how to use the social media tools that they weren’t adding to our productivity. This added time was not so much in learning the mechanics of the tools, but dealing with the added complexity of having so many different communication channels.
Of course, simplifying is easier said than done. Though as the other Emoji’s on Buzzfeed’s list show, as you get older you might just find yourself simplifying your life in other ways as well:
