Social media breaks anyone?

This whole idea seems to be far-fetched but it’s coming. Gone will be the days when your employees will go out for a coffee or smoke break – I’m sensing a decline in demand for coffees and cigarettes. This whole social media thing is not just a threat to us employer representatives (like when erring employers gets fired and they blog us, tweet us etc.) and to traditional business owners who fails to innovate and exploit social media to their advantage – Starbucks didn’t wait.

Is (social media) going to stay or just a fad? Hmmmm….This was the question being raised by management when telephone, internet, and mobile phones hit the streets. So what now? Are we just gonna sit back and relax or be part of the social wave? Some people just don’t get it.

Is your social media policy in place for 2010 – considered to be social media full scale dominance? Are your social media strategies in place – already aligned to the next wave of revolution that includes managing five (5) generations of workforce and a 3D inspired social world? These are just some of the questions we should be asking everyone who want to contribute to the bottom line.

If you’re to check with history, we hardly allow our employees before to bring their mobile phones inside the company premises, but seeing and knowing its advantage in terms of decision making and cost we tweaked our policy thereby exploiting its advantages. Some companies even include it in their job offers for them to lure high-flying digital natives. This is just a scenario that we can mirror with if we’re to consider social media as threat to productivity or not. It seems every management blog is not at all against it if you really do trust your staffs coupled with a strong policy – a policy that doesn’t kill creativity and productivity towards the use of social media.

Furthermore, today’s tech-savvy professionals use social networking to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues around the world, and to stay connected all the time they use their mobile phones. Now, my next question is, is your mobile phone policy aligned with your social media policy? This is one critical component also that we HR pro should look into since every transaction nowadays has been migrating to our mobile phones. In fact, it only took 9 months for Apple apps to hit 9 million downloads. Portable performance management has been presented and I won’t be surprised if this application will be available to every employee’s mobile phones because things will get too personal in the not too distant future.

So, “coffee breaks or smoke breaks anyone?” You’ll hear less of these invites because all you’ll be hearing now is “social media breaks anyone?”