To 'Office Facebook' Or Not -- That Is the Question

Like people in most offices around the world, we face a dilemma about the use of Facebook by employees when they're on the job at Inward Strategic Consulting.

Should we be annoyed at the prominent role that Facebook has come to occupy in our work environment, often distracting employees when they use the site for personal reasons?

Or should we be embracing Facebook as the next major tool for gaining still more engagement by our employees?

We're coming down on the side of harnessing Facebook to boost employee engagement, particularly as the site's operators continue to evolve it.

The coming debut of Facebook Home may be the tipping point on this question, for our company and others, because it will encourage separation of personal and enterprise use of Facebook -- and provide an easy way to bifurcate them.

Already, we're hearing about the trend among our clients to find ways to use Facebook as a medium for communicating with and among employees. A major retailer, for example, has newly launched local-store Facebook pages for store managers and associates to communicate with one another. In turn, this new use of the outlet presumably gives them more reason to become brand advocates.

We also are seeing more businesses make Facebook an integral part of the "Start" menu on employee desktop computers. Clearly this reflects the fact that, to many Millennials now entering the workforce, continual access to social media ranks as a huge priority whether they're on the job or at home.

Sure, we continue to wonder whether employees really need to be tethered to Facebook and Twitter all day, making status updates and checking others' -- sometimes literally by the minute. We continue to believe that it's simply rude, maybe even insubordinate, for employees to mentally and physically "check out" of meetings for a social-media update.

But on balance, we think it's incumbent upon enlightened employers to pull a jujitsu move on Facebook and find a way to make it their friend instead of an annoyance.

What do you think?

Now, That's What We'd Call Employee Branding!

Of course, we don't recommend this for every employer -- or probably any employer! But a New York City real estate company has come up with a unique way to engage its employees: pay them to tattoo its logo on their bodies.

We usually like to see organizations engage their employees in more cerebral ways. And while tats are pretty mainstream these days, you've got to imagine that some employees of Rapid Realty were taken aback when owner Anthony Lolli offered a 15-percent pay raise to any employee who was willing to don the Rapid logo -- permanently.

But according to the local CBS affiliate, about 40 employees so far have been tattooed with the Rapid Realty logo, a stylized graphic, with some including a silhouette of what apparently is the Brooklyn Bridge.

There are no requirements for size or placement of the tattoo.

Lolli said it wasn't his idea; an employee came to him and said he was going to don a logo tattoo as an expression of loyalty to the company. It caught on, and Lolli has been picking up the $300-apiece tab for the employees who want to participate.

And Lolli told the TV station that he's going to get around to being tattooed as well.

'Thriving' Employees Make the Organization Better, Too

If you could change one aspect of your company's culture that would result in employees who were:

• 32 percent more committed to the organization
• 46 percent more satisfied with their jobs
• 125 percent less burned out

... would you do it?

Of course you would. And the way to achieve such gains is to turn your enterprise into one that fosters the propensity for employees to thrive.

"Thriving," a set of academic researchers are suggesting, is the "joint experience of two things: vitality and learning." And in the current issue of Rotman Magazine, put out by the business school at the University of Toronto, they suggest steps that organizations can take to create and encourage the conditions for employee thriving.

This notion of helping employees thrive isn't exactly the same as the idea of worker engagement that is so central to the philosophy of Inward Strategic Consulting. But there's a lot of overlap, and we share a commitment to strategic creation of a culture in which employees feel enlisted and fulfilled -- which, in turn, creates loyalty to your company and a sense of mission to your customers.

"Vitality" refers to being energized and feeling "alive" at work, the researchers say in their article, "Thriving at Work: Why It's Important and How to Enable More Of It." Thriving people "feel passionate about what they are doing and produce their own energy through excitement for the work."

"Learning" refers to growing through new knowledge and skills. Thriving people "believe they are getting better at what they do," the article says. "They are self-learners who actively seek out opportunities to learn and develop."

They measured the performance and opinions of workers at more than a dozen organizations where they concluded people thrive compared with less-fortunate places to work.

Want to achieve such gains, including employees who miss 74 percent fewer days of work, and thriving leaders who are rated 17 percent higher ratings by their subordinates than leaders who reported lower levels of thriving?

The authors suggested three strategies for companies to "move ahead on the road to thriving":

Healthy habits: Eating right, exercising and taking breaks at work and at home. Companies can make these things much easier for employees to do.

Craft more meaningful and impactful work. Maybe look for opportuntiies to help someone or turn attention to tasks that evoke interest or passion, the article suggests.

Increase opportunities to innovate. That enables employees to learn something new or grow a new capability, which boosts thriving.