Technology as an employee relationship management tool

Employees and employers are experiencing relationship with each other every day. This makes employee relationship management very important. A good relationship management can enhance communication and interaction between employee and employer, between co-workers themselves as well as to bring more business opportunities. One way to achieve this is through multiple social network platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. If you go to LinkedIn, you will see their goal is to improve and facilitates business relationships of professionals as they can exchange ideas and opportunities through the connection with people and the professional identity developed online.

Facebook is the dominated social network now though some employers prefer to use blogging as a communication platform with their workers. Facebook is more like a life portal because things inside is more personal and playful instead of only business. It helps employers to look underneath the surface (productivity) of employees to develop, accelerate and deepen a relationship with them as large part of a relationship is based on hidden element. Some companies catch twittering or going on Facebook at work. However, this may even lower employee’s productivity and loyalty. There is a study by the University of Melbourne shows that those who use internet during work hours are more productive than those who don’t. ( You can look at the result here http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/04/study-surfing-the-internet-at-work-boosts-productivity.ars ) I think this is because people always need some personal time to refresh and rest their mind so to get back their concentration. 

As facebook is a more personal social network platform, many people will clean their wall or open an new account in order to build a better image at work. But I don't think open a new account is a good way as the world is small and there are so many weak ties in our social network. Eventually your colleagues or employers will find out your original account and by that time they might think you are not honest. Plus, when you go on facebook at work probably you want to relax a little bit. It is pointless to only log on the account that deliberately created for work. Also, for me, I don't suggest to share very personal conversation , crazy party photos or very private photos in internet because there is no real privacy in such open online world. It is also related to how we protect our and others’ faces. In real world, like when you go drinking or dinner, it is important not to embarrass ourselves and lose our family, friends and partners’s face no matter what. How we look and present ourselves also affect how people around us think of our charisma. Similarly facebook is a public and open online community, where photos and words we post and tag reflect our respect to ourselves and others. If we always have the right attitude in doing things and know how to make use of the private settings, we need not worry about facebook being used as a relationship management or spying tool at workplace.

 

Some people claim that they lost their job because of facebook, I don’t doubt facebook can be one way for employer to do personal evaluation but how influential facebook is at workplace also depends on the style of company. My best friend told me that her team leader added all her teammates on facebook and the teammates (especially girls) gossip each other’s photos and relationship status very often. However, I have an Aussie friend in Hong Kong working as a manager told me that no one in his company cares about others facebook. He ‘friend’ with workmates on facebook only if they ask for, therefore he only got 2 workmates in his friend list so far. Our personality, intelligence, productivity and interpersonal skill can be revealed by time. This is also why some companies prefer to organize activities like annual dinner, picnic and after work fun like go for happy hour beer and karaoke to observe and understand more about their employees in person, rather than to bother with their facebook. Therefore, wall cleaning and opening a new account are not necessary.

Technology Addiction

There are 2 issues about technology I am interested in when talking about it. The first one is whether technology controls us or the other way round and the second one is if the internet alienating us from the ‘real’ world. 

Think of your cell phones, your blackberry, your IPhones and your video cameras , we use them to play games, take pictures, play games, go on internet, check email and have instant chat every day. Have you recognized that we never put our phones in a distance that we can’t touch? We put them in our pocket, jacket, handbag, on pillow, next to the laptop, right in front of us in the table or put Bluetooth on our ears. We can always reach our phones because we want to reply instantly to the email, messages or phone calls received! Also laptop and IPad, they allow us to surf internet on lap and in arm instead of a desk which make us easier and more consistent to use these devices. We log on Facebook at once when we use computers, we keep refreshing it even though there’s no new message. We go on Google to search what’s going on in Japan, what stupid things Bush has done or how many children Stanley Ho actually got.  

All these are technology addiction- game addiction, instant chat addiction, cell phone addiction, Googe adiction and facebook addiction. We might not obviously realize that technology is controlling us, but it does!  For instance, CCTV cameras give security to different places. Computer systems control traffic lights, flight schedules and train routes. Different equipments to measure climate, geography, population, medication, so on and so forth. In the disaster areas in Japan now, although there is no power supply, technology from nearby areas is vitally important to do the rescue. Some say God is controlling the world, but I say technology has taken over our lives! Put it this way, what would our life be like without technology?

For some people, they can’t even distinguish the ‘real’ world and the ‘virtual’ world as they are too devote themselves towards video games or online dating. The main reason is that people can achieve something that they think it is impossible to do in real world like vent their anger by killing people without imprisonment, able to rule a whole city or have a second life affair. In the second life, the world is virtual ,but the emotions are real. Somehow the world can be virtually real like when there are multiplayer playing the game, people learn how to socialize, build community and protect their community. They can even make virtual world engagement or wedding. People develop characters that represent themselves as an identity in the second life so that they can transfer their real world actions into the virtual world. For people who don’t play online games like me, might think the virtual world is meaningless. But there’s no denying that technology is able to alienate people from the real world by emotional connection. A number of studies have scientifically shown that when a person plays a video game over and over and becomes addicted to the pleasure got from the video game, a kind of chemical called Dopamine in the brain will increases during the times of pleasure and its increasing level is different according to different form of gaming. In other words, our brain will release an addictive chemical due to the excitement we get from playing video games.       

Last month I watched a movie called ‘Black heaven’.

It is a Belgium movie about an innocent boy ( who had a girlfriend) enamored with a mysterious girl who was treated as a lure in a video game world called ‘black hole’ by her crazy brother. Since the boy was fascinated by the things he saw in the video game world, there’s nothing more important than to go to ‘black hole’ every day to meet that mysterious girl. He awoke not until he almost got killed by her brother in the real world. We can see people already have an idea that that game addiction can be dangerous.

Facebook Privacy

Facebook is the biggest social network service in the world. I really like it because it helps me to keep in touch with people. Since we don’t have much time to meet up with all our friends and it’s so annoying to ring a friend very often, leave a wall post or comment on our friend’s facebook is the easiest way to show our concern and care. I do make new contacts and talk to strangers in facebook sometimes when I am too boring at home. I don’t think it is that dangerous as I won’t reveal all my personal information. It is only some chit-chat and I can defriend them anytime if I don’t feel like to keep them in my list.

Recently, more and more of my friends starting to concern about their privacy. Some of them hide their wall post, some of them hide their tagged photos, some of them forbid people to leave comments, and some of them restrict strangers to add them as friends.

Sophos, the world's most secure antivirus firm, had conducted a research of facebook users. They found that 46% of Facebook users accepted friend requests from strangers. 89% of users in their 20s divulged their full birthday. Nearly 100% of users post their email address. Between 30-40% of users list data about their family and friends They had also conducted an experiment in 2007 to see how Facebook users aware of their privacy by opening fake facebook accounts. The result showed 41% of users divulged their sensitive personal information to a complete stranger. http://www.sophos.com/security/topic/facebook.html 

I think full birthday is not really private information. I am happy if my friends (or boyfriends) put their full birthday on Facebook because I can’t remember all of their birthdays. It’s like a reminder for me. For email address, I think it’s fine too. Some people hide their page but they still keep their email address public. Sending emails is probably the easiest, indirect and ‘not- too- odd’ way for people in different relationships and in different places to contact each other. For people who put their real phone/pager numbers, I still don’t think they lack privacy-savvy as they made the choice to be willing to publish their personal information for knowing/flirting with more strangers.  

There is no way to fully protect our privacy once we started to use internet. Not only when we signed up Facebook the data is transmitted to other tracking companies, but also when we play or use the Facebook apps. According to an investigation by Wall Street Journal in Oct 2010, all of the top ten most popular apps on Facebook like Farmville, frontier ville , zynga, etc. send users account data to at least 25 advertising and data companies, some even create a file about users to track their online activity. Most of these apps are created and released by independent software development companies. ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html ) 

                                                       facebook-privacy-at-issue-again

It is quite surprising to know this. However, if you think deeply, many things we do in real life is also providing a chance for advertising companies to track us. For instant when we open a bank account, the bank have all our personal information which they can sell their insurance scheme or other banking services to us. When we sign up as a VIP member in cosmetic shops, they might also transmit our personal data to other beauty shops. Advertisements is out of control today, but this is the only way to make money for some companies like Facebook. Like what Rodney has said in class, as long as the benefits I get outweight the cost I pay for using facebook, I don’t mind they take my personal information for money to run this social network service.