Excellent slideshow on social media by Marta Kagan (of the The Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius blog). Language is NSFW…well, depending on where you work and what your team/organization’s culture is.

Enjoy :)

[Via A Blog Around the Clock]

Finally, there’s a study that shows empirically what most of us have known all along: personal Internet usage at work actually boosts employee productivity.

The study was conducted by Dr. Brent Coker from the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne and you can read about it here:

• University of Melbourne Media Release – Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure
• Ars Technica – Study: surfing the Internet at work boosts productivity
• Michael Specht – Internet usage at work makes you productive 

According to Coker’s research:

“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.”

It’s About More Than Just Productivity

But it’s not just about productivity, as Specht points out, it’s also about trusting and respecting your employees.

I personally dislike companies that prohibit what Coker calls Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) with the justification that when you’re at work, you should be doing nothing but work. That’s just silly because it’s a completely unrealistic notion of what work is. Work is a subset of life, not the other way round. So you can’t exactly ignore the rest of your life – or, indeed, the rest of the world – while you’re at work.

[There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. It’s okay to apply principles of Taylorism to, say, when you’re working in the kitchen at McDonalds. It’s just that you shouldn’t extend those principles to when your employees are not doing those specific kinds of tasks.]

The problem with a lot of companies is that, while they understand this basic principle (i.e. that there is life outside of work, even between the hours of 9am and 5pm), they aren’t tech-savvy enough to see that this also applies to using the Internet. Companies will, for example, do things like allow flexible working hours so you can do your banking during your lunch hour or go as far as to provide coffee machines and televisions in their kitchens and lounges so you can take a really good break during the work day. And yet, these same companies will block the use of webmail services, social networking sites, and online video sites which, to people like me, are pretty much the virtual equivalent of the kitchen and lounge (and sometimes the preferred equivalent).

So What’s the Problem?

Part of the problem, as has been pointed out in the past, is the generational disconnect between the Baby Boomers, Gen-X, and Gen-Y. That is, there exist numerous members of older generations who don’t understand that, for some members of the younger generation, a good work break could be eight minutes of e-mailing and checking on your social networks, four minutes of going through photos of your newborn niece, and three minutes of watching the latest viral video that’s making the rounds. And this disconnect is understandable. However it is then the job of middle managers to convince senior managers that this kind of personal Internet usage is actually okay.

Another part of the problem are the reports written by generally Internet-clueless analysts on how much companies are “losing” by letting employees access social media or online video sites during work hours. What tends to happen is this calculation:

• Think of an average employee who earns 50k a year; that’s $25 an hour.
• If this person spends, on average, 30 minutes a day on Facebook and Gmail. That translates to $12.50 per day “lost”.
• So, for the 250 days a year that this person works, the company is “losing” $3,125.
• If this company had 400 employees, the company would be losing 1.25 million dollars per year on employees accessing webmail and social networking sites.

Company executives look at this calculation and exclaim: “What?! We’re paying our employees $1.25m to access Facebook and Gmail! Block both those sites!”

The problem, of course, is that while the calculation is essentially correct, the reasoning behind it is flawed. The reasoning being that you are paying your average employee exactly 41.6c per minute to work for you and that every minute this employee does something other than work your money is being wasted. Now if this person was working on an assembly line, your loss-per-minute-not-worked calculation would be valid. But for every other employee, it’s not.

Why is it not valid? Because your employee is human – who has human wants and needs – and it is unreasonable to treat this person like a work-producing automaton upon whom you can do this kind of dehumanising calculation.

To Conclude

My point, then, is that studies like Coker’s are really useful because they empirically demonstrate that you can’t blindly apply principles of scientific management (i.e. Taylorism) across an entire organization.

And because these studies come from a business department of a large and well-respected university – and they use terms that businesses understand (specifically, ‘productivity’) – they will probably do some good.

If nothing else, reports like this tend to make their way into business magazines and give executives something to think about. This particular study may not get companies to unblock access to webmail services and social media sites, but it’s a start.

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P.S. What’s almost funny are the companies that are so completely disconnected for what’s going on online that they don’t even know what Facebook is and therefore don’t have a policy on whether they should block it or not!

Four new MBS Leadercasts have been published recently and they’re all worth a watch:

• ‘Communicating with Customers in the 21st Century’ by Peter Danaher
• ‘Telling the Financial Story’ by Richard Parker
• ‘Types of Change: Diagnosing Your Change Project and Understanding How to Successfully Manage it’ by Paul Kirkbride
• ‘Philosophy and the Future of Business’ by John Armstrong

Duncan Bucknell, who co-taught the Strategic Management of Intellectual Property course that I took during my MBA at Melbourne Business School has just launched an intellectual property related podcast on his IP Think Tank website (you can get the first episode here).

Not only does Bucknell really know his stuff, his blog is the place to go to for all IP-related news, information, and resources. Indeed, it’s the #1 IP blog in the world according to BlawgSearch. And the podcast is an excellent addition to everything he’s already doing there.

Thanks to the Deloitte Leadership Academy, all passengers flying aboard Qantas’ Airbus A380s will have free access to business courses — ranging from five-minute videos to 40-minute lectures — supplied by Melbourne Business School, Harvard Business School (including Harvard Business Review articles), Stanford Graduate School of Business, Macquarie Graduate School of Management, and the University of New South Wales.

Awesome.

For more:

• ‘Business school in all A380 classes‘ — Australian IT news item
• ‘Deloitte Leadership Academy and MBS‘ — Melbourne Business School news item
• ‘Would on-plane training appeal to you?‘ — Lifehacker Australia discussion

Max Gladwell has started a really good series of posts called ‘How to Debate Climate Change with Conservative Skeptics’ and he’s written parts one, two, and three so far. They’re aimed at an American audience and use mostly US examples but they make a good read for everyone else as well.

I’ve been working at Linfox for almost two months now and I’ve hardly even noticed. Time really does fly when you’re having fun and working your butt off, doesn’t it?

Now that my major project at Linfox is complete — we re-launched Linfox.com last week — I thought it would be a good time to do a quick recap of how things have been at work and how the Melbourne Business School MBA is helping me do my job really well.

But before I get to that…

Actually, funnily enough, the thing I found most immediately useful at my new job was not something I learnt during the MBA but is something related to the work I did in MBS’ Information Technology Solutions department earlier this year. That is: I knew how to use SharePoint really well.

In May, MBS launched its new intranet (called ‘MBS Direct’) based on Microsoft’s SharePoint technology. Just a month before that Linfox launched its own intranet (called the ‘Lintranet’) also based on that technology. Having learnt a great deal about SharePoint at MBS — and many SharePoint tips and best practices from our vendor, Bullseye — taking over from the previous Online Coordinator was incredibly straightforward and hassle-free.

E-Commerce and Information Management

As you would imagine, stuff learnt in Pat Auger’s E-Commerce and Information Management courses is coming in really handy in my new job. Here are two lessons I’m finding most useful at this time.

1. Making a business case: My boss understands how important both the intranet and public website are to the business; she is, after all, Linfox’s Group Communications Manager. People in top management, however, are more focused (as they should be) on running a logistics company, a couple of airports, and a few other Linfox Group businesses. My boss and I therefore need to demonstrate — in almost everything that we do — the business benefits of maintaining these two sites (which I am in charge of and she is the champion for).

This is where something like Google Analytics comes in. My boss can now tell her boss that, just last week, over 1,000 unique visitors got to Linfox.com via a search engine (we also know the keywords they used to get there) and that, by far, the most popular section on the site is the ‘Working at Linfox‘ one. Now the site’s only been up for ten days so there’s more data to collect before we take things to the next level (like further developing the recruitment section) but already it’s clear what one of the major benefits of having a good website is: you can communicate directly with potential employees in order to get the best and most suitable candidates to apply for jobs that you advertise.

2. Internal communications: Having spent years in IT — which in many companies is the one of the least communicative, least understood, and possibly least-liked departments — I know how important it is to communicate internally the benefits of the work you’re doing. Things are a little different in the Communications department but internal communications is still an important task for me.

For example, two phrases that I’ve found to be really useful are “it’s on the Lintranet” and “search for it”. These are important because the last iteration of Linfox’s intranet took the usual route to uselessness: it had too much stuff on it (it had become a bloated file archival dump) most of which was irrelevant (no versioning, lots of replication) and hard to find (limited search functionality). This new iteration is lean, well-organized, and has versioning, no duplication, and excellent search functionality. However, not everyone knows this.

My job, then, is to (a) keep the intranet in great shape and (b) to tell everyone how great the intranet is. My aim is to make this a virtuous cycle: if people expect it to be great, they’ll make sure it stays great — with a little poking, prodding, and policing from me, of course! So when someone asks me for something, I usually say “it’s on the Lintranet” (since it usually is) and, most of the time, they’re able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. If not, a simple search does the trick.

One thing that really helps me here is the direct support I get from my team. This mostly comes in the form of a line in every bit of internal communication that we do that goes something like “you can find (more information about this) on the Lintranet”.

More in Part 2

There’s much more I want to write so I’m going to split this into two, or maybe three, posts. I have yet to talk about:

• Applying people skills learnt in the Managing People for High Performance, Negotiations, and Leadership courses.
• Applying marketing skills learnt in the Brand Management and Consumer Behaviour courses.
• General skills learnt while doing the MBA; such as how to handle multiple projects, deadlines, and priorities without breaking a sweat.
• Observing how things are working at a more strategic level within the company; such how business and corporate strategy are playing-out, what leadership is being exhibited by senior management, what the company’s environmental strategy is, and how intellectual property is being managed.

But more about all this next time.

I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog that Mark Ritson, my Brand Management professor at Melbourne Business School, contributes to the Branding Strategy Insider blog. Of course, “contributing” is a mild word considering the number of blog posts he writes!

Here are some of my favourites:

• Private Label Brands: Too Powerful?
• Commodity Status is in the Mind
• The Power of the Super Consumer
• Branding Desperately Needs to Rebrand Itself
• Worthless Brand Values
• Target Marketing and Greater Profitability
• Complexity: Enemy of Brand Positioning
• iPhone Strategy: No Longer a Grey Area
• Recession Marketing

Impressive, isn’t he?

One of my favourite professors at Melbourne Business School is Amanda Sinclair. I took her Leadership course and, some weeks ago, attended one of her public lectures on leadership, called ‘Journey Around Leadership‘, that is now available online (both audio and video). It’s a great lecture that I highly recommend you watch.

One of my favourite professors at Melbourne Business School was Mark Ritson with whom I took the Brand Management course. One of the reasons I liked him so much was because of the wealth of real-world knowledge that he brought to the class. In fact, that was one of the reasons quoted when he was voted our (i.e. the full-time MBA students’) favourite teacher at this year’s MBS Valedictory Dinner.

One of those bits of real-world knowledge was his advice on how to pick the right marketing or branding agency for your company. Actually, it was more about which agency not to pick. Should an agency talk to you or show you a PowerPoint slide about any of these three things, he said, they will have instantly demonstrated the ineptitude:

1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
2. A SWOT Analysis
3. Brand concepts other than brand positioning, brand equity, and brand architecture

I was actually going to write about these three things in more detail some time over the next couple of months but, fortunately, Ritson has written about them himself in a post called ‘Three Telltale Signs of an Agency’s Ineptitude‘ on The Branding Blog. It’s a great read that I highly recommend you check out.

[Via Trevor Cook]