3 Tools to Beat Your Social Media Addiction
What’s the greatest enemy of workplace productivity? Chances are you’re thinking social media, and you’d be absolutely spot on. Facebook was born with the goal of connecting as many people as possible, but sometimes it seems like they’re hell-bent on turning the world into a horde of mindless clickers with no regard for privacy.
From a business perspective, social media is a double-edged sword. While it might play an important role in bringing in business, it can be quite a distraction from department to department. In fact, recent studies have found that Facebook alone costs the global economy a staggering $3.5 trillion in wasted productivity. That’s why it’s time to help your employees curb their addiction to social media.
Block Websites with URL Filtering
URL filtering allows you to blacklist websites you don’t want accessed over your company network. If you’ve ever seen a notice like “your organization does not allow access to this website,” then it has probably been blocked by a URL filter.
Implementing a URL filter is by far the quickest and easiest way to stop people from squandering their working hours on sites like Instagram and YouTube.
More sophisticated URL filters even incorporate real-time content filtering using machine-learning techniques. Given how enormous the web is, this approach tends to be much more practical if your goal is to block every website that employees are likely to be wasting time on.
Free Up Bandwidth With Simple Management Tools
Managing bandwidth is essential for making sure important software apps and processing resources are always available. After all, you don’t want an important video conference to be interrupted because an employee is bogging down your network to play online video games.
Bandwidth management tools let you reduce network congestion by changing the way traffic moves over it. They allow you to distribute resources based on URLs, ports and certain usage protocols. For example, you can create a hierarchy of tasks, so something like your VoIP phone system gets priority over procrastinating individuals’ streaming cat videos.
Turn off Notifications
Have you ever checked your phone’s lock screen and seen a long list of notifications? It seems that platforms like Facebook and Twitter want to let you know IMMEDIATELY about completely irrelevant status updates and pictures of friends’ latest kitchen misadventures. If you’re suffering from notification fatigue, then it’s probably time to eliminate this torture device masquerading as an instrument of communication.
Turning off notifications will greatly reduce distractions in the workplace and help people overcome their perceived need to keep their eyes glued to their smartphones.
On company-owned devices, you should enable notifications only for important work-related matters, and you should also encourage your employees to disable notifications -- or at least put their smartphones on silent -- while they’re at work.
At Red Key Solutions, we understand that every business needs technology to thrive in the modern world. That’s why we offer solutions that help employees stay productive. Contact us today to see how we can cure the procrastination epidemic that’s plaguing your workplace.
