Snowball - The Blog

About time someone said it!
Some companies don't seem to be getting that the world has changed, and that the internet is an everyday-thing, just like a telephone. Over at my company, everybody has full access to the internet, email, IM... I'm certainly not suggesting that one should make abuse of their internet access at the workfloor. But what is more relaxing than reading something on the web while drinking your coffee in the morning... Or eating at the PC, while looking up something.

Companies who don't seem to be getting this, will face serious issues in the time to come. You might think, are there still companies like this? Yes! More than you would think!! Most of these can be found in old, traditional sectors, where time has been standing still. People who work there have not evolved either, and easily follow the old rules that the company issues. Most of the time, these companies are governed by very conservative people. People that don't think out of the box. A race that will extinct, since young people will not be willing to work for them. And that's just good.
It's their opinion still that internet is loss of time. Well, think twice. If people are feeling locked in, they'll be less productive, resulting in higher costs for the company. And in the future, it'll result in these firms not finding any dynamic employees, resulting in even more problems... Down the drain indeed.

I have had this opinion for quite some time, and now Microsoft has expressed that same opinion, as can be read here:

Jobseekers will think twice about employers who lock down work internet access, a senior Microsoft executive said today.“These kids are saying: forget it! I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to work at a place where I can’t be freely online during the day,” said Anne Kirah, Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist.
“People that I meet are saying this to me every day, all over the world.”Kirah made the comments during the keynote at the opening of Microsoft’s annual developer love-in, Tech.Ed, in Sydney. “Companies all over the world are saying, oh, you can’t be on the internet while you’re at work. You can’t be on instant messaging at work…” she said. “These are digital immigrant ideas.”

Kirah defines ‘digital immigrants’ as people who were not born into the digital lifestyle and view it as a distraction rather than an integral part of life. The younger generation of workers have been using computers and mobile phones since birth and she calls them ‘digital natives’. Kirah cited a Norwegian psychologist who claimed that young people were now so reliant on digital communication that “taking a mobile phone away from a teenage girl is the same as child abuse.”

“Digital communication is part of people’s lives now. Their friends online are the people they identify with.”

The rest of this very interesting article can be read here.