No Facebook, No Job: Young People Would Quit If Denied Facebook
I woke up this morning, and instead of grabbing the morning paper, I signed into to Digg to see what wonderful thing Barack Obama was doing (for those not familiar with Digg, Obama is a demi-god on there).
One story that was Dugg up came from ITBusinessEdge, via Vnunet. A poll done by IT services provider Telindus showed that 39% of 18 to 24-year-olds would consider leaving their jobs if their employers decided to block access to Facebook. The number was far lower for older employees. Additionally, 21% more of the youngsters said they’d feel “annoyed” by the ban.
What does this point out? First of all, that young people have high expectations of the freedom they should have in the workplace. There are trade-offs to this. Obviously, if you have a friendly work environment like Google, you’ll have to make up for your perks by working longer hours.
However, if asked, I believe a majority of the young people who said they would leave their jobs if not allowed to use Facebook would say that they see the social network as an important tool for networking. The jury is still out on whether or not Facebook is useful or just a goof, but the most important thing is that young people see social networks as useful and will continue to further integrate them into their lives going forward. It will become a self-fulfilling prophesy at some point that social networking will overlap more significantly with people’s occupations for the simple reason that so many young people use social networks in their everyday lives and almost by accident will integrate them with their jobs.
How will the parts of social networking that involve personal lives and work overlap? That remains to be seen, and so far, Facebook has proven itself very useful for keeping your friends in order but has yet to be fully developed as a business tool. But many are using it for business, and utilizing it for business will only accelerate as the “Facebook generation” comes of age.
Of course, in certain occupations, the task for the worker is cut and dried and usage of social networks only bleeds bandwidth and resources out of the system. But the time will come when social networks are an integral part of any job involving the building of relationships, and young people know this, and there’s no going back on it now.
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